Structure and Style revisited

There is one HTML element in particular that jumps out as needing to be moved to
Style -- BR.  When you have something like ...

	<h1>The Old Man<br>
	    and<br>
	    the Sea</h1>

... the <br>s are there just to break the lines; they are for visual effect, not
for sematic markup.  Wouldn't it be better to have ...

	<h1>The Old Man and the Sea</h1>

... with something like the following applied to it ...

	h1

		break-after: words(3,4);
		text-align: center; /* etc. */
	}

... where "words" could take a single value or a list?  Maybe even have
"letters(...)" as well as "words(...)"?

Isn't <BR> part of the legacy of presentational HTML?  How would one express the
equivalent of <BR> in XML?  I really haven't thought much about the syntax, but
I do think there is a need to somehow express this in CSS.  As a precedent, we
do have "page-break-before", etc. for paged media.

Just a thought...


/Jelks

Received on Friday, 19 February 1999 23:49:38 UTC