I suspect the horse may be dead from all this flogging, but here goes...

About those open-P and close-P tags:

Just about every note I have written here has a similar history:

• Position at start of text area above my sig;
• type first 'para';
• type Enter-Enter;
• type next para;

... and either at this point or after hitting 'Preview', thinking 'Oh, tut!' and entering </p><p>between each para, then jumping to the top and putting in an initial <p>.

Now there are a couple or three places in this thread where venerable members of the Monastery have said words like (my apologies, I'm not au fait enough to do the linking trick)

Just put a <p> at the beginning of every paragraph

, and :

you just need <p> for paragraphs and <code>...</code> for code

So I have had a little follow-on question: how strict/forgiving are the "PM HTML recommendations", specifically with regard to whether the closing tags are required?

Update: I followed the recommendation in Markup in the Monastery to maximise my HTML 'error reporting', and that went some way to answering the question. It seems that:

• if I omit an initial <p> I am forgiven but the next </p> is, unsurprisingly, flagged;
• the Monastery markup does prefer writers to close paras with a proper </p> tag but tolerates those who don't use one.

So although I think I don't have the question I had when I started, I shall leave this post here as it may help others in a similar situation; and may act as a recommendation to turn on that HTML check in your Display Settings!

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.