What's not in the spec? Every example in the article is valid HTML, and the article itself, which is written in the same style, is valid as well:

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Flofi.limo%2Fb...

> Document checking completed. No errors or warnings to show.

Or are you complaining that the rules are too complicated? It's very verbose and explicit because this is a specification, but the basic rule of thumb is that anything that would normally be a block element and thus doesn't make sense inside a paragraph will end that paragraph. In practice, this is not really an issue I run into.

Moreover, you need to know about this rule even if you don't omit </p>, because this is the list of elements that implicitly ends a paragraph. For example, <p><div></div></p> is invalid HTML because <div> ends the paragraph implicitly, making it equivalent to <p></p><div></div></p>.

If you don't like that, then your problem is not with this particular code style but HTML itself, which is reasonable. HTML's syntax is very complicated due to its history and doesn't always make sense. But you still have to know how it works regardless of how you personally like to write it.

Read the quoted sentence again (from the source you brought here), none of those clauses apply to:

<p>

Block of text ...

Which is what they do in the article.

I don't understand what you mean. Please elaborate.

That quote says that </p> is not needed in many cases. When you say "none of those clauses apply to <p>", this is true, you can't omit <p>, only </p>... but the blog article doesn't advocate for omitting <p> at any point.

1. The article omits </p> liberally.

2. The spec details situations where the </p> tag may be omitted.

3. None of these (2) apply to what's going on at (1).

Okay, let's go over this then.

First, let's talk about the basic case where there's no whitespace between the two paragraphs.

    <p>Paragraph 1</p><p>Paragraph 2</p>

In this case, the first </p> can be omitted according to the rule "A p element's end tag may be omitted if the p element is immediately followed by an [...] p [...] element [...]", resulting in this code:

    <p>Paragraph 1<p>Paragraph 2</p>

If we assume that the body ends immediately after this (either because there's a </body> or because we've reached the end of the file, since </body> and </html> are optional tags) then we can remove the second </p> as well because of the rule "A p element's end tag may be omitted if [...] there is no more content in the parent element and the parent element is an HTML element that is not an a, audio, del, ins, map, noscript, or video element, or an autonomous custom element":

    <p>Paragraph 1<p>Paragraph 2

Now, let's get into the case where there is whitespace between the two paragraphs:

    <p>Paragraph 1</p>
    
    <p>Paragraph 2</p>

In this case, you can't remove the first </p>, because the rule is that it must be "immediately followed" by another p element. However, what if we start with this code?

    <p>Paragraph 1
    
    </p><p>Paragraph 2</p>

In this case, we can remove the first </p>, resulting in:

    <p>Paragraph 1
    
    <p>Paragraph 2</p>

and again, we can remove the last </p>, resulting in:

    <p>Paragraph 1
    
    <p>Paragraph 2

Now, this is different from what we started with. The whitespace is now inside the first paragraph instead of after it. But since HTML does not render this extra whitespace by default, it's of no real consequence.

And that leads us to this point: the HTML spec is specifying the exact circumstances where you can omit tags without changing the DOM. However, if we are okay with changing the DOM a bit, by moving that whitespace into the first paragraph, then we can simply pretend that we wrote

    <p>Paragraph 1
    
    </p><p>Paragraph 2</p>

from the beginning, and apply the rules to that instead.

> But since HTML does not render this extra whitespace by default, it's of no real consequence.

But it does render that extra whitespace (as a single space). Try selecting the text of the article and you see there is a trailing space after every paragraph.

You misunderstand the spec. Exactly what confuses you is hard to discern, but perhaps you misread “the p element” as referring to the <p> start tag, when in fact the element includes the start tag, text contents, and (if present) the end tag.