A long time ago, and far far away, <p> was a paragraph separator. (Did
</p>
exist in those days?)
Perhaps this is why Neal says "Now, when I was first learning "tags" for
using
in forums and whatnot so many years ago, to me <p> meant "double space"
and
<br> meant "single space"."
This was, of course, back when I didn't even know it was HTML, just "cool
stuff". But even then it was not a paragraph ender, but a starter.
From
http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/rfc1866.txt :
5.5.1. Paragraph: P
The <P> element indicates a paragraph. The exact indentation, leading
space, etc. of a paragraph is not specified and may be a function of
other tags, style sheets, etc.
Typically, paragraphs are surrounded by a vertical space of one line
or half a line. The first line in a paragraph is indented in some
cases.
Example of use:
<H1>This Heading Precedes the Paragraph</H1>
<P>This is the text of the first paragraph.
<P>This is the text of the second paragraph. Although you do not
need to start paragraphs on new lines, maintaining this
convention facilitates document maintenance.</P>
<P>This is the text of a third paragraph.</P>
Even in HTML 2.0, complete open and close markup was used. The closing tag
was optional, as you can see.