Re: div and p

> On Jan 11, 2017, at 5:01 PM, Marjorie Burghart <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Dear all, 
> 
> I was wondering: is there a sensible reason why a <p> may occur before a series of <div>s, but not after? I can't make sense of this rule. 

When P1 was developed, our understanding of conventional textual structure 
was (and in my case remains) that one can and frequently does have, in a
book with chapters, sections, and subsections, some paragraphs of text in
chapter 4 before the beginning of section 4.1, and likewise one may have
some paragraphs in 4.1 before subsection 4.1.1.  But in conventional Western
typography I do not believe I have ever seen a book in which section 4.3 (say)
ended, was not followed by a section 4.4, but WAS followed by some paragraphs 
belonging to chapter 4.  An explicit or other closing, maybe.  But not paragraphs
of normal text.

One reason for this is the straightforward one that in conventional Western
typography the ending of any section is typically signaled only by the 
beginning of the next section of equal or higher rank — so if you did want to
have the structure described above, your book designer might be hard put to
it to figure out how to get the idea across.  (This assumes that you were able
to get the idea across to the book designer in the first place.)

Dominic Dunlop of the British National Corpus once presented me with what he
argued was an example of the structure which I claimed then (and still claim now)
never to have seen.  But his example was also interpretable as a labeled list
in which each item had a label and a few paragraphs.  There was text after
the last labeled item which was neither a further labeled item nor part of the last
labeled item.  But the default TEI document grammar didn’t forbid paragraphs
after lists.

If one is using divs for units other than conventional chapter / section / subsection
style parts of a text, the logic just given may be less compelling.  Which makes
me curious:  what are you thinking of doing with divs that leads you to want
paragraphs after the last subordinate div?  (Would ab do the trick?)

I will leave to your judgement whether the reasons that moved us count as
sensible, but hope either way to have answered your question.

 

********************************************
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
[email protected]
http://www.blackmesatech.com
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