Re: p tags and indenting in Html Mode

[Tyler Smith]

Apologies if this gets posted twice. I waited more than 24 hours for the 
first response I sent to show up, but I think it got lost.

Richard Riley wrote:
> pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) writes:
>   
> > Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@eku.edu> writes:
> >     
> > > Html mode recognizes that <p> tags don't need to be closed, so
> > > successive tags get indented to the same level. But when an unclosed
> > > <p> tag is followed by a heading (e.g., <h3>), the heading gets
> > > indented as if it were within the previous <p>, as do all subsequent
> > > tags that aren't <p> tags. In other words, the heading is indented
> > > further than the <p> tags that were there before. How can I get html
> > > mode to keep the indentation at the same level? I put a small example
> > > below to clarify.
> > >
> > >       
> > Close your tags!  So your html becomes more compatible with xhtml.
> >     
>
> A lot of web designers don't go anyway near xhtml because it's a pain
> and doesn't work properly anywhere other than in theory :-; A google for
> "xhtml not working" tells you why.
>
> Having said that closing tags is a better idea.
>   

I don't really care one way or the other about xhtml. I tried closing my
tags by turning on sgml-xml-mode. This makes html mode insert a closing
</p> tag, which solves my original problem. But it also expects closing
tags for other html tags that don't normally use them: link, base, img
etc. So in sgml-xml-mode, indentation is screwed up following all of
those tags. I can of course manually close my <p> tags, or use C-c /,
but there should be a better way. Can I make html-mode close p tags
without turning on sgml-xml-mode? I have tried poking around with the
tag skeletons, but I find the documentation a little challenging.

As an off-topic aside, is xhtml still moving forward? I thought the W3C
had recently decided to ditch it in favor of html 5? Anything I've read
suggests that there's no compelling reason to use xhtml for webdesign.
If that's the case, I'd rather get html-mode configured to support
regular html. I'm not really invested in either option, I just want
consistent indentation that doesn't require manually tweaking my tags.

Thanks again,

Tyler