Re: SVG12: tBreak sequences

> tBreak element is defined as "The 'tBreak' element is an empty element
> that forcibly breaks the current line of text." The draft is unclear
> what this means for e.g. the sequence <tBreak/><tBreak/>, please change

At some risk of talking off the top of my head, I assume this is
analogous to <br> in HTML.  I am not sure that many people are really
aware that the presentational effect of <br> is either not very well
defined or it is actually mis-implemented on every GUI browser and
a correct implementation would stop the commmon abuse of using <br><br>
instead of <p> from working.  As such, I'm not sure that they will
understand the point that is being made here.

My understanding is that the original intention of <br> was to act like
the break command in traditional non-WYSIWYG markup languages, e.g.
.br (or even .XX) in nroff or \break (?) in TeX.  The effect of these
is to force out any partially filled line, but do nothing if there is
no such line, so that excess uses have no effect.

<br> as implemented by GUI browsers is more like the WYSIWYG word processor
hard newline character (sometimes entered as control-Enter).

I suspect many people simply don't know the true origins of the <br> element
in HTML and that the HTML definition has been copied without realising that
it was intended to describe a behaviour that most users of HTML never
experience (Lynx does treat <br> in the original way, although it now has an
option for more GUI-like behaviour).

Received on Monday, 18 April 2005 07:00:18 UTC