Re: Should <br> be removed from the HTML5 spec?

Thanks for all the replies.

As things are currently going, seems that both 10828 and 11211 are likely to
be fixed, and both kinds of <br> would be supported.
It seems that this would make everyone happy, and I have no problems with
it.
(My concern was due to criticism about 11211. I did not feel comfortable
about removing the soft-linebreak capability, for aesthetical reasons at
least. )

Hence, I will not post the (<br> --> &ls;/&ps;) suggestion to Bugzilla
unless one of the two <br> behaviors is dropped.

Still, from a "puristic" point of view, the proposal seems to be a better
match to the design goals of HTML5, and it is possible to implement.
So I'll answer some of the points below.

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Mohamed Mohie <MOHIEM@eg.ibm.com> wrote:

> Hello Amit,
> I don't feel comfortable with the idea of removing <br> from HTML5 spec for
> the following:
> 1- Deprecating <br> will cause incompatibility issues for web pages
> supporting browsers at different HTML levels.
>

We are discussing HTML5, which is a major version - exactly the point where
developers and web authors *expect* compatibility to be broken in favor of
improvements (indeed HTML5 already breaks compatibility in other areas as
well).
Browsers should want to support the new markup language (note that HTML5
will not be considered complete before there are working compatible
implementations).
Until the major browsers have reasonable support of HTML5, websites would
probably offer HTML4 versions of the contents anyway.

2- It will need a lot of rework from web pages and software that produce
> HTML pages to account for the new attributes.
>
>
I think that blindly replacing <br> with &ps; is simple enough, and would
work for the vast majority of websites. The remaining sites, mostly the ones
that currently do not support IE, would simply replace it with &ls; . I
guess there should already be other, more problematic problems for
HTML4->HTML5 converters.

    thanks,
      Amit A.