Barry, the XHTML 2.0 [1] authors agree with you. From the Working Draft:
"In comparison with earlier versions of HTML, where a paragraph could
only contain inline text, XHTML2's paragraphs represent the conceptual
idea of a paragraph, and so may contain lists, blockquotes, pre's and
tables as well as inline text. They may not, however, contain directly
nested p elements."

Of course, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for 2.0 to be implemented
anytime soon.  It might be fair to compare it to HTML 3.0 [2], which
turned into the considerably more modest version 3.2 and also foresaw
MathML.

To me, the semantically improved p element is an example of something
that would do well in a modest XHTML 1.2 which still retains backwards
compatibility and interoperability with existing user agents as a design
principle. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any such plans.

- Ed.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/ 
[2] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/ 

>>> "Barry" <wassercrats@hotmail.com> 3/24/2005 1:38:43 PM >>>

I wouldn't mind my list being considered part of the paragraph it's in,

since the paragraph refers to the data represented by the list, but it

should be treated as a separate part of the paragraph. But maybe it
should 
be CSS because then you could properly use that style even if there's
no 
semantic link to the paragraph.

> This looks more like a CSS problem than a markup one to me as the
list is 
> clearly separate from the rest of the text.
>
>
> -- 
>  Anne van Kesteren