- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 18:57:56 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Mon, 23 May 2005, Orion Adrian wrote: > Are empty elements necessary bad? I have yet to see an argument > against all empty elements. Empty elements are symptoms of procedural markup. They are not bad as such; procedural markup has its uses. Empty elements crept into HTML due to hasty design and lack of structural approach. This is explained in some detail at my http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/empty.html > Now mind you I think <l> is better than <br /> because being able to > address lines is important. Quite right. It illustrates that semantic markup delineates _elements_ whereas empty element tags... well... > However if you don't need to address something, then an empty element > as a seperator works wonders. Procedural markup can work wonders. But a "separator element" is an oddity. Either it's procedural, and could mean "break a line" or "page eject" or "pause" or "draw a horizontal line", or it's structural markup in anomalous syntax: if <hr> is a separator between elements, then <body>foo<hr>bar<hr>zap</body> really means <body><part>foo</part><part>bar</part><part>zap</part></zap> with a strange element name and with many tags implied. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2005 15:58:00 UTC