A Section Containing both Paragraphs and (Sub)Sections

An HTML document (or generally a document in any other text-oriented XML) will have block and non-block elements. For instance, a paragraph (called 'p' in HTML, 'para' in DocBook, and so on) is a block element. And so are sections (tagged 'div' in HTML), chapters and so on.

Paragraphs are different from sections in that they cannot hold block elements themselves. So what about a section (a sectioning element) holding paragraphs and further sections?

To begin with, somehow it would seem weird for a paragraph to live between two sections or right after all other sections. Picture it. You have a chapter comprising several sections plus a paragraph after all the sections, at the very end of the chapter. How do you navigate to the paragraph?

To some people, having paragraphs before all the sections does not make much sense either. Why?

Let us go back a little bit. What sets paragraphs apart is that they don't have a title, whereas sections usually do. So we would be ruling out, or discriminating against, elements without a title or their own. They inherit the title of the element that contains them...