Dear Andreas,
At 08:46 PM 11/3/2006, you wrote:
On 04.11.2006 01:20 Andreas M. wrote
> BTW: I would be very glad if someone pointed me to a document on
> the web, where I can find (un)ordered lists being parts of sentences in
No need. Found it myself. Just a few seconds ago, when I wrote:
/*
* VLC's HTTP capabilities allow for two different things:
* a) Using VLC as a media-server
* b) controlling VLC via HTTP requests (making VLC de facto a web-server)
* resulting in [...]
Now, that's what I call a an ordered list within a paragraph and seems
correct language to me.
Indeed. Here are more examples:
http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/style-revised.html#9
(and see also #10, whose first paragraph contains a complete sentence
that contains a list.)
Also, I think it's worth considering that (a list within a paragraph):
* This issue applies to other elements besides lists, such as tables,
figures, and, notably, block quotations, and of which might occur
within paragraphs.
* There are many XML document models in wide use that permit lists
and other "block-level" elements within paragraphs, including
Docbook, TEI and NCBI Journal (to name only three of the best established).
I think by raising the accessibility issue you've revealed the core
of the difficulty with HTML. It's natural and proper to expect that
an accessibility application such as a reader would take the term
"paragraph" at face value and treat it differently from a div, even
if the latter were designated a "class='paragraph'". In this, they
are simply taking HTML at its word, to mean that its "p" is what we
mean by a "paragraph" and not just some arbitrary "division"; and
"paragraph" is a term whose implied semantics (as you're discovering)
go well beyond "vertical whitespace" into other things. That's what I
mean when I say a paragraph is a "rhetorical thing" (some might say a
"logical" thing) rather than a "typographical thing". Students in
school learn to write paragraphs according to sets of rules that only
incidentally include what should happen with respect to whitespace --
as in fact the whitespace that identifies a paragraph will vary from
case to case.
(A "paragraph" is literally a mark that used to be placed in the
margin or the flow of text to identify text divisions in an age when
paper was expensive and whitespace frequently wasn't used for this purpose.)
But due to the constraints imposed by its content models, an HTML "p"
becomes just about useless for marking what are actually the
"paragraphs" in a text (too many paragraphs require more than one p).
This certainly does pose a problem for HTML-rendering applications
that don't work by providing paragraphs with vertical whitespace
(about the only thing an HTML p can be trusted to do).
There are some problems that transformations can't fix by themselves.
We've discussed the best mapping and the choice, in this instance,
between too tight and too loose. XSLT can even do an incorrect
mapping if you like. But why HTML doesn't support a correct mapping
cleanly is out of scope for this list.
Regards,
Wendell
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