Re: separator/seperator Re: About XHTML 2.0

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Orion Adrian wrote:

> We still haven't gotten past the issue that pargroup adds an
> additional layer of depth in some places and not in others or adds it
> to all places which seems silly when all I wanted was a simple
> separation or transition.

Sounds much like the arguments in favor of <br /> and against <line>.

> How does one style non-content or implied content?

It depends on the style language. But <separator /> _is_ non-content, and
still you're supposed to style it. It's not the separator that needs to be
styled; rather, the presentation of paragraph groups should be styled to
make it apparent that they are distinct groups. As in traditional
typography, the styling will depend on context.

In CSS you can easily specify, for example, a bottom border for a pargroup
that is immediately followed by another pargroup. Or you can use generated
content to add, say, "* * *" if you like.

> <br /> was bad because I never wanted to address the break,

Huh? Surely there are situations where the break should be suppressed, or
replaced by something else.

> <pargroup> is bad because I
> don't want to address the groups, but I want to address the break.

It would be very natural to style a group of paragraphs. Separating it
from the next group is one example of that.

> There are no truths here, only statistical realities.

Statistics only tell us that 97.52 % of all percentages have been made up.
This isn't about statistics, and this isn't about religion or philosophy.
It's about describing the structure of documents. Whenever you are tempted
to define and use an empty element, you have moved from structure to
presentation, or you are using contrived markup that throws content data
into attributes.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Friday, 3 June 2005 13:52:09 UTC