Re: XHTML 2.0 - <line> or <l>?

On Tue, 24 Dec 2002 12:53:35 EST, <SCJessey@aol.com> wrote:

> I finally got a chance to look over the latest Working Draft for XHTML 
> 2.0 and I was disappointed to see that the <line> element has been 
> altered to read <l> instead.
>
> Does anyone else think this is a bad idea?  On some text editors, it 
> looks an awful lot like the old HTML italic tag which will doubtless 
> cause confusion.

There is a SVG element called line (for a line segment, not a line of 
verse). This will cause no problem for a namespace aware user agent (since 
the namespaces are different), but may make the code harder to read or 
refer to.

More importantly, size matters. I wouldn't expect the 'l' element to be 
used in most pages, but where it is used, it will be used a lot. Having a 
'table' or 'caption' element is a good idea, but replacing 'td' with 
'table-cell' for consistency would be a bad idea. Most of the code in a 
typical data table is markup, it isn't uncommon that the table blows up to 
ten times or more the original size (that maybe used a tab separated 
format), and this is using as minimal element names as 'tr', 'td' and 'th'.

The case for 'l'/'line' is less strong than 'td'/'table-cell', but it is 
quite equivalent to the case for 'tr', a line of table.

-- 
Jonny Axelsson,
Web Standards,
Opera Software