Re: separator/seperator Re: About XHTML 2.0

I'm curious: what does the 1st edition of "The Chicago Manual of
Style" say, or what do the books on style say before Chicago existed.
Is it our purpose only to mark up texted written in the 19th and 20th
centuries and manuals only written in English then perhaps <pargroup>
would work, but before going that route perhaps we should start asking
people and start doing analysis of documents pre-1900 and see is this
style guideline was always used. My gut instinct says no.

Orion Adrian

On 6/3/05, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Micah Dubinko wrote:
> 
> > For the record, one such reference is Orson Scott Card, _Characters &
> > Viewpoint_, 1988 Writer's Digest Books, p. 157 under the heading
> > "Changing Viewpoint Characters".
> 
> "The Chicago Manual of Style", 15th edition, says:
> 
> "1.79 /Other ways to break text./ When a break stronger than a paragraph
> but not as strong as a subhead is required, a set of asterisks or a type
> ornament, or simply a blank line, may be inserted between paragraphs.
> Using a blank line has the disadvantage that it may be missed if the break
> falls at the bottom of a page."
> 
> This seems to be in accordance with the reference you cite.
> 
> So it is really a separator between _paragraphs_, not at an arbitrary
> level. Besides, logically speaking, it really does not relate just to the
> paragraph before it and the paragraph after it but _sequences_ of
> paragraphs. Denoting the break with * and paragraphs with p1, p2, ...,
> the construct
>    p1 p2 p3 * p4 p5 p6
> does not really mean that * separates p3 from p4 but that it separates
> p1 p2 p3 from p4 p5 p6.
> 
> An optional element like <pargroup> would express this nicely:
> <pargroup>p1 p2 p3</pargroup> <pargroup>p4 p5 p6</pargroup>
> 
> This is a structure that actually appears in works of literature.
> I guess part of the question is: do we want to offer some markup that can
> be used to describe structures that people have used and are using in
> their works, or do we just try to impose our ideas of how works _should_
> be structured? Similarly, chapters, sections, subsections, and
> subsubsections are structures actually used in literary works;
> an abstract notion of "section" that can appear at any nesting level is,
> at best, an abstraction with a name that suggests a more concrete meaning.
> 
> Should browsers be required to separate consecutive paragraph
> groups from each other in the default presentation? I would say yes,
> if we take markup seriously. Such grouping is no more "optional" in
> rendering than paragraph structure. Naturally, the _method_ of indicating
> the separation may vary. And browsers should be a little more clever than
> with a simple <hr> or <separator>.
> 
> This is actually rather analogous with the move from <p> as a paragraph
> _separator_ to <p> as a start tag for a paragraph element - a move that
> was formally taken years ago, but the original idea (simple and natural in
> a way) was reflected in people's thinking, authoring habits, and even
> tutorials and commentaries long after that.
> 
> --
> Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 3 June 2005 11:39:21 UTC