RE: About XHTML 2.0

Anne/Dan,

> Dropping it would work too. I still haven't seen any use 
> cases that require this particular empty construct.

That doesn't mean there aren't any! Steven gives a number in one of his
presentations:

  <http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/04-19-steven-XHTML2-XForms/>

(See about 1/3 of the way down.)

The idea is that we need some kind of *semantic* separator. In a navigation
list it might separate one group of links from another; in some prose it
might be a 'pause' that is more than a new paragraph, but less than a new
section or chapter.

But obviously it is not a 'horizontal rule'. For a start, a separator in
many languages is vertical not horizontal, so the solution shouldn't be
named for its presentational features. And also if all the author wants is a
horizontal or vertical rule, then they can use CSS borders. In the same
spirit, a voice renderer could legitimately bypass an <hr> since there is no
way of knowing whether the author simply wanted some presentation, or
intended something more; the voice browser *shouldn't* bypass <separator>
though, since it is possible to know unambiguously that some sort of pause
is required.

So, if we agree we need something, what should we call it? I don't want to
sound unsympathetic to authors, but I can't go along with arguments about
how easy or difficult a tag is to spell. For a start I think It's no
different to having to remember "iso-8859-1", or whether "beginElement" is
"BeginElement". At some point people will just learn "separator".

Regards,

Mark


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