Should a heading be inside or outside a <p>?

Question

I have a div element and within that div, we have text between p elements.

I want to add a heading. Should it go inside or outside the p?

Which is better:

<p>This is text     <h3>This is my h3</h3>     More text </p> <p>another text<p> 

or

<p>This is text<p> <h3>This is my h3</h3> <p>another text<p> 

Answer 1

It is impossible to put a heading element inside a p element in HTML markup, not just formally but because browsers implicitly terminate an open p element when they encounter a heading. So the question is meaningless: an element that cannot exist in a certain context cannot have any meaning (semantics) within that context.

Instead of using p to group text and headings together, you can use the div element or, with the usual caveats, HTML5 novelties like section and article.