Re^2: Wiki-Style syntax for posting

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 between each para, then jumping to the top and putting in an initial .

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  at the beginning of every paragraph

, and :

you just need  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  I am forgiven but the next  is, unsurprisingly, flagged;
the Monastery markup does prefer writers to close paras with a proper  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!

This signature will be ready by Christmas

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Re^3: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 17, 2008 at 15:28 UTC
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? Closing a P element is done implicitly in the absence of closing tag, both in HTML and on PerlMonks. I've never had a problem there. On the other hand, I've had problems omitting closing tags for table-related elements on PerlMonks, even though it was valid HTML.	[reply]
Re^3: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by JavaFan (Canon) on Oct 17, 2008 at 15:21 UTC
Considering that the HTML DTD specifically allows the close tag of the P element to be optional (on the account that the close tag can be inferred), I'm surprised the recommendation here is to use the close tag. That sounds very un-Perlish - and more Pythonesque. Not that I ever do ;-) (Nor do I use close tags for LI)	[reply]
Re^4: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by jvector (Friar) on Oct 17, 2008 at 15:34 UTC
Surprised me too. I think I will turn down my error reporting level again ;-) Reminds me of the apocryphal stories about turning off 'use strict;' to make the errors go away ;-) This signature will be ready by Christmas	[reply]
Re^4: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by DStaal (Chaplain) on Nov 28, 2008 at 20:34 UTC
XHTML requires them, while HTML leaves them optional. Perlmonks seems to use transitional, in HTML mode. Which means it should be ok, in theory. That said, the interactions between them and a several of the other HTML tags that are allowed here can get fairly complex, and it is not always obvious — even with the spec — which way they are supposed to be resolved. Consider them something that use warnings; will complain about. ;)	[reply]
Re^3: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by blazar (Canon) on Oct 20, 2008 at 13:15 UTC
you just need `<p>` for paragraphs and `<code>...</code>` for code I'm replying to you because you're just the first one (from a search POV, top-to-bottom) to point out so, and it's fundamentally true: I would call it the zeroeth-order approximation to the Truth™ ;) Now, to be admittedly fussy and since nobody else seems to have mentioned them yet, I would add that before any other "cosmetic" tag would come PM-specific `<readmore>` and (to a lesser extent) `<spoiler>` ones which are sometimes recommended, to define the first-order approximation. As for the level of strictness at the monastery, I don't have time enough to follow the subthread(s?) that this issue spawned, but as far as I'm concerned I close all tags: indeed I'm pretty much always writing xhtml nowadays, whenever I have to "write html"* that is - I feel more comfortable and psychologically at ease. And it's not tiresome for me in any way. You may check that by inspecting the xml source of my nodes, well at least since some years on... `--` ~~If you can't understand the incipit, then please check the IPB Campaign.~~	[reply] [d/l] [select]