New Message: Re: HTML 4.01 validation in 9.6

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A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$1557

By: Matt Deatherage (frontier at gcsf.com)

I was thinking about this further, and as long as changes are being made, I'm not sure using <p /> is sufficient. This at least validates, but it's inserting blank paragraphs for presentational purposes, and that's not exactly what anyone wants. I noticed in the code for the news items that it wasn't a choice - double-returns in news items are /always/ converted to blank paragraph tags for line spacing.

I think it should be a choice, perhaps a new preference named "#autoNewsParagraphs". If missing or "true", you'd get current behavior. If "false," manila would not insert empty paragraphs into news items and would rely on you to get the work right. This could almost allow HTML 4.01 Strict, if the templates were correct.

(It would also be very nice to have a callback at that point in anilaSuite.new.formatNewsItem - let a callback routine have the string "s" for the text of the item, process it how it wants, and hand it back to the newsitem renderer. That would at least give me a shot at solving compatibility problems with older messages - on a site-by-site basis, I could reformat text, adding paragraphs and block elements as appropriate for that site's existing message corpus, etc.

Not sure what I'd do about DG comments that might not have the right syntax, but it'd be a start. ;-)

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