Re: div and p

I don't know whether it was the example that Dominic gave you, but the 
usual counter example might be something like
the structure of say Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or the Decameron, where 
you have a bunch of distinct stories floating about in a framing narrative.
Something like

<div n="1">
"Tell us a story mate"
"OK."
<div n="1.1">
<p>It was a dark and stormy night...</p>
</div>
"That was a rubbish story. Give us a better one!"
<div n="1.2">
<p>Once upon a time there were three little encoders called Vesta, 
Nesta, and Tilly...
</p>
</div>
"Much better!"
</div>

The common existence of this sort of thing may be why we (reluctantly in 
my case) introduced <floatingText>, I think.
However in typographic practice, as you rightly say, the bits of framing 
commentary are nearly always rolled into one or other of the framed 
texts, with consequently painful editorial decisions as to whether (in 
my silly example) "That was ... one!" should be considered as the 
epilogue to the first story, or the prologue of the second. Which it is 
clearly both.

On 12/01/17 00:13, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>> 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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