Which tag should be used as paragraph separator in Javadoc?

Question

Which is the more appropriate HTML tag for breaking up paragraphs/long sections of javadoc so according to best practices?

Is it <p /> or <br />? Why?

Answer 1

Welcome to the land of HTML 3.2.

According to the official guide on writing doc comments, the correct way to separate paragraphs is with the paragraph tag: <P>. Take a look at the seventh bullet in the section on Format of a Doc Comment.

Ordinarily, I would strongly recommend against using such old, outdated practices for markup. However, in this case, there's a decent reason to make an exception. The JavaDoc tool (unless radically updated with custom Doclets) generates old, crufty, somewhat broken markup. Browsers have been built to be backwards-compatible with the crazy old markup of the day, so it makes sense for you to just go along with it. Your use of <P> to separate paragraphs will be in line with the rest of the JavaDoc output.

Answer 2

Strictly speaking a self-closing <p /> makes no sense, as <p> should be used to contain a paragraph, i.e. the paragraph should be encased by <p> and </p>.

<br> however is a "lower level" tag that indicates a line break. So the semantically correct way to indicate paragraphs would be to use <p>:

<p>This Foo is used to frobincate a {@link Baz}.</p>
<p>It is quite groovy!</p>

vs.

This Foo is used to frobincate a {@link Baz}.<br>
It is quite groovy!

Visually the <p> results in more whitespace between the lines, while a <br> will just start a new line and not introduce any major whitespace.

Answer 3

With Java 8, a single starting element(<p>) works.

Note that javadoc doesn't like the closing element (</p>).