Paragraphs in List Items

By Deane Barker • April 27, 2007 •

Here’s something that WYSIWYG editors don’t do well: paragraphs within list items. Like this : This is a paragraph. This is another one. This is another list item. The problem is that one you’re in a list item and you press Enter, you get a new list item, not a new paragraph. I never been able to…

The document discusses the issue of paragraphs within list items in webmail editors, specifically Word, which do not support this function. The author notes that pressing Enter in a list item results in a new list item, not a new paragraph, and suggests using the P tag to separate two blocks. Despite a discussion on the issue by Simplebits, the author is unable to find an editor that supports this method.

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Here’s something that WYSIWYG editors don’t do well: paragraphs within list items. Like this (ironically, Markdown does it just fine):

This is a paragraph.

This is another one.
This is another list item.

The problem is that one you’re in a list item and you press Enter, you get a new list item, not a new paragraph. I never been able to figure out how to do this in any WYSIWYG editor, Word included. This is the HTML I’m trying to get to:

<li>
 <p>Para 1</p>
 <p>Para 2</p>
</li>

Some would say, just enter two line breaks, like this;

<li>
 Para 1
 <br/>
 <br/>
 Para 2
</li>

But this is wrong on both a “clean code” level, and for the fact that Para 1’s block formatting is tied in with Para 2. This is the entire reason we have the P tag, really – to separate them into two blocks.

Some folks over at Simple Bits talked about it three years ago and came to the conclusion that this is the “correct” HTML for this, but I can’t find any editor support for it.

Anyone know of an editor that supports this?