Maurice Lanselle wrote:
Ross Gardler said the following on 21/06/2005 15:29:
...
(note a paragraph is a group of sentences, so list, ordered or
otherwise has no place inside a paragraph)
Ross
Not everyone would agree that lists (and long quotations) never have
their place in paragraphs. The essence of a paragraph is that it treats
or develops a single point. It may be a short phrase, or even just a
word in a dialogue, or quite long. Discussion of a list's content may
well belong in the same paragraph as its introduction.
"The object of treating each topic in a paragraph is, of course, to
aid the reader. The beginning of each paragraph is a signal to him
that a new step in the development of the subject has been reached."
(Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style").
Note the title "Elements of Style", now read on...
The work-around of placing the list between two paragraphs may be
satisfactory, at least when the list begins or ends the paragraph.
However, if the paragraphs are indented, the reader may not easily
recognize that the end of the discussion is the continuation of the same
point. As Strunk and White caution,
"But remember, too, that firing off too many paragraphs in quick
succession can be distracting. Paragraph breaks used only for show
read like the writing of commerce or of display advertising.
Moderation and a sense of order should be the main consideration in
paragraphing."
That is a statement about the *display* (or style) of the information
not about the contextual *mark-up* of the information. If you want to
change the *style* of something being output then you use class attributes:
<p class="indent">blah blah</p>
<ul class="indent">
...
</ul>
<p class="indent">...</p>
This allows you to format the content appropriately for the given output
medium (which is what Forrest is all about) and context. Remember that
although this user was writing directly in XDoc this is not requried by
Forrest, we support a very wide range of input formats.
Of course, you can achieve the same effect with embedded lists, but not
with our Documentv2.0. If there is enough demand to do this we will
change the DTD accordingly since we are movng towards using a subset of
XHTML2 as out intermediate language and XHTML2 allows lists embedded in
para's.
Ross
