> Though here we just gave the definition for two western languages. I=20
> wonder if paragraphs has a meaning in Japanese, in Chinese, in some=20

Chinese books, at least as far children's fiction, and adult language
teaching books, published in the PRC go, have both list and paragraph
constructs.  Chinese newspapers and magazines set both horizontally
and vertically and Japanese newspapers definitely have paragraphs.
I don't have access to a large enough sample, or the time, to check them
for list constructs (actually, on a closer look there are some list
constructs in both adverts and editorial in the the Chinese language
newspaper I'm looking at (traditional characters, set horizontally,
but published in Europe)).

> African scripts, etc. The fact is that often HTML has been designed by=20=
> 

Ethiopian has paragraphs.  I fact, the only ambiguous case I can find
in the newspaper samples in Nakinishi's "Writing Systems of the World"
is probably only ambiguous because it is hand written so the sample isn't
large enough to see the structure.  Every other example has paragraphs.
(Most African languages are written in Latin or Arabic scripts, so
a book about scripts doesn't have large samples of them.)