Paragraphs, please!

Paragraph, a simple concept has become a giant issue all over the Internet. Why was it such a difficult concept to understand? <p> was — and still is today — the HTML tag to indicate that a new regular text paragraph was starting. Initially, it wasn’t necessary to indicate the end of the paragraph with </p>. The beginning of the next one with <p> was enough.

However, all of that has remained in the past, because Microsoft® decided to ignore it. Then people started writing their e-mails with double enters. Today, believe it or not, Microsoft® has changed the way their programs work: they all generate an automatic empty paragraph with just one enter. That is, internally, they’re generating one simple <p> tag.

Too late! The incredible generalized public ignorance about the concept of paragraph has driven more than one code programmer crazy. Just take a look at the blogger.com site. The regular HTML language would simply ignore empty space. In other words, if you typed inside an HTML page two or three or four empty lines, they would all be ignored. If you wanted an empty line, you needed to write <br> — which later on became <br /> — and then you would get one empty line, even if you were within a <p> paragraph. That makes a lot of sense!

Back to blogger.com… Today, if you write inside the HTML section, and you enter empty space, the most horrible thing happens: it prints the empty space! That’s what I would call a total aberration! I would like to punish whoever made that decision.

Also, if you type from the rich edit editor, instead of generating <p> tagged paragraphs after an Enter, you generate empty lines! The aberration completed and rounded up.

It all comes from the error that Microsoft® started several decades ago. And they have corrected the mistake, but now others are actively resuscitating it, making of it even a more aberrant issue. Back to blogger.com, the aberration goes as far as forcing the HTML page to behave — and for this they must do something special — in such a way that you need to write without empty spaces!

What a way to rewrite the world upside-down!

It’s time for us to ask them to get their act together. All rich text editors should generate simple HTML formatting text, so that a style sheet can easily define the personality of the <p> paragraph, the <li> personality, and other very simple and useful stuff.