Question

TWiki renders text by inserting <P /> for each occurrence of a sequence of blank lines. The normal way of rendering paragraphs is: <P>paragraph text</P>

Although the shortcut is convenient, it leads to unexpected results on two counts:

• White space has meaning and is rendered with whatever the current style is for the P tag in the css
• Paragraphs are not rendered according to the style of the P tag, but instead take the style of the container they exist in.

I realise that this approach has a long history/legacy. Is this something that is likely to change?

Environment

-- BramVanOosterhout - 24 Apr 2006

Answer

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I think it would be very difficult to change. TWiki markup is an inherently unstructured language, and when extracting structure to build HTML you have to make difficult tactical decisions about how to use tags. <P /> allows you to avoid making hard decisions w.r.t paragraph structure. Replacing it would also involve recoding the rendering parser, which is highly likely to break compatibility with old TWiki releases.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 24 Apr 2006