Re: [Lynx-dev] at www.wsws.org, articles' <p> <\p> don't make whitespace (lf); what html-hacks needed?

[David Woolley]

David Combs wrote:
> Using lynx, please have a look at this site:
>
>   www.wsws.org  (world socialist web site).
>
> Choose any article.
>
> In my lynx, at least, the paragraphs have no blank-line
> separating them.

I had a look and on the pages I tried I was getting blank lines where 
paragraphs were used.  In some places it abuse <br>, though.

However, it does flash up a bad HTML warning, which generally indicates 
quite severe structural failures, and it violates appendix C rules for 
serving XHTML as HTML, both of which make a nonsense of trying to use 
XHTML in the first place.

Specifically, it is missing a space before some of the />'s, which is 
needed to make some HTML parsers tolerate the /, and it has a commented 
out style sheet, which would really be commented out when parsed as XHTML.

> Looking at the "\"-html, I see the seemingly-ok use of
> <p> <\p> to demark the paragraphs.

<p> elements surround paragraphs in everything after HTML 2.0, although 
a Microsoft \ would just be an illegal character.  In response to 
another reply, as this is actually being served as HTML, it is 
impossible to nest <p> elements, although </p> ones may get ignored.

However, the validator, I believe, ignores the content type, and I think 
some recent versions of Lynx also, invalidly, try and parse XHTML served 
as text/html as XHTML.

Also, note that using an entity without a final closing ; is a 
well-formedness error in XHTML and should cause an XHTML parser to abort 
(in this case it is a case of failing to use &amp; when giving a form 
type URL explicitly, something that HTML parsers tend to tolerate, but 
XHTML ones must not).

> What hacks to the html do I have to make to get
> its articles to come properly, and readibly!, separated?

Run it through the validator and fix every errror.

Preferably change the document type to HTML 4.01, and remove XHTML 
specific markup, or comply with Appendix C of the XHTML specification.

--
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.