Okay, I think I was a bit hasty calling it a containment relationship; I
had two things in mind that probably should be handled in different ways.
In the case of textaul sidebars, I'd agree that it's a rendering suggestion
and I like your suggestions (which I've not included here) for dealing with
it.
However, I'm not sure that's the case with embedded lists. On occasion,
I've struggled with word procesors that force lists to be separated from
the paragraph in which they're contained and was incorrectly thinking that
FIG might be a compromise that expresses the relationship between the
paragraph and the list without offending those who don't seem to want
things nested within paragraphs (for reasons which I admittedly do not
understand). So, I'll pose this as a question (which I hope hasn't already
been beaten to death somewhere along the way). If I have a paragraph that
looks something like
Xxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxxx xxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxx
xxxxxx xxxxx xxx (1) xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx, (2) xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxxx, (3) xxxxx xxxxxx. Yyyy yyyyy yyyy.
but I think it would be more effective if presented as
Xxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxxx xxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxx
xxxxxx xxxxx xxx
(1) xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx,
(2) xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx,
(3) xxxxx xxxxxx.
Yyyy yyyyy yyyy.
how should I mark it up? While, as the author, I'd be willing to allow
either presentation (i.e., the style sheet could override my preference),
in the latter view, I definitely would not want the normal whitespace
inserted between paragraphs to be inserted between the list and the last
line nor would I want the normal paragraph indentation to be applied to the
last line. With various word processors, the solution was to either embed
a lot of presentational markup (i.e., line breaks and spaces) or to split
the paragraph into 5 paragraphs of three different types. Neither solution
expresses the semantics while leaving the presentation flexible. Is there
a way that does so in HTML?
Rodney
[1] http://cdr.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/www-html-1995q3/0440.html