Topic: p-tag in a p-tag

hi just a quick question: is it allowed (w3c-valid) to have a p-tag inside a p-tag?

if not? is there an alternative?
i am using a wysiwyg-editor to generate text for a webpage and this contains p-tags.

Nested P elements are schabernack.

It's just unpossible per the HTML4 specification of the P element. The ending tag of P is optionnal in HTML, plus Ps can not contain any other block level element ( including P of course ).


Of course it is possible to do schabernack programmatically, but I fail to get the semantic of nested P elements. Plus the user agent will/should close the parent P the second you append a P in it. Therefore a page containing nested P elements should validate, and its DOM tree will feature sibling P elements.


HTH,



(Edited by poi on 08-31-2008 20:02)

quote:

---

GRUMBLE said:

if not? is there an alternative?

---

An alternative to what, exactly?
What are you trying to accomplish that has you wanting to nest paragraphs in the first place?

As to the semantics, as poi alluded to, there is just no such thing as a paragraph within a paragraph; a paragraph is a purely singular object. It would make no sense...

Holy smoke!

I just tweet'ed with a friend from work and he pointed to me that it IS possible to nest P elements in an evil evil way :

<p>This is the first paragraph 
	<object>
		<p>This is the second paragraph 
			<object>
				<p>This is the third paragraph</p>
			</object>
		</p>
	</object>
</p>

This of course is pure valid HTML. It makes no sense whatsoever to have a P in a P but it is sorta kinda technically possible. If an OBJECT is inside a P, or any element only accepting inline children, the text fallback should be a SPAN or simply a text node.

Want more weird a** behavior from HTML4.01 ? No problem. OBJECTs are allowed in the HEAD tag. Which mean that you can load something with various fallbacks, including "regular" markup, inside the HEAD.

thanks for the answers, guys!

the problem is, that i have a website, where content is edited using a wysiwyg-editor (tinymce) which produces lots of p-tags.

and i need to format all that content in a paragraph. i guess i will do span or div.

thanks!

DIV isn't allowed, either (since it's block level), so best use SPAN.

(And no way to deactivate tinymce? Normally there should be an option to use a text-only editor instead - though in this case sticking with the P and SPAN probably is the best way to do it, anyway.)

(Edited by Nathraiben on 09-01-2008 05:57)

<div><p>foo</p><p>bar</p></div> OTOH is perfectly ok in all regards.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/strict.html