Comment by afavour
11 hours ago
> A p or li tag, at least when used and nested properly, logically ends where either the next one begins or the enclosing block ends
While this is true I’ve never liked it.
<p>blah<p>blah2</p>
Implies a closing </p> in the middle. But
<p>blah<span>blah2</p>
Does not. Obviously with the knowledge of the difference between what span and p represent I understand why but in terms of pure markup it’s always left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ll always close tags whenever relevant even if it’s not necessary.
This interpretation of the p element implies that it contains a paragraph. But HTML is first and foremost a document format, and one could just as logically conclude that the p element simply starts a new paragraph. Under the latter interpretation, </p> would never exist any more than </hr> or </img>.
In practice, modern HTML splits the difference with rigorous and well defined but not necessarily intuitive semantics.