Re: Should <br> be removed from the HTML5 spec?

Hi Amit,

Amit Aronovitch wrote:
> [...]
>
> Hence, the new suggestion:
>
> (1) Add mandatory entities (temporary names):
>     &ps; for U+2029 (paragraph separator, replacement for "hard" <br>)
>     &ls; for U+2028 (line separator, replacement for "soft" <br>)

&ls; and &ps; introduce new markups and thus a new best practice.

Since, as you mentioned, in RTL with numbers and Latin words "the <br>'s 
are normally positioned in non-sensitive places.", there are likely very 
limited cases having a problem with <br>.

So, IMHO, I prefer the actual best practice to use &rlm;/&lrm; markups 
to deal with these cases, instead of new markups.

>
> (2) Remove <br> from HTML5 spec.
>     Add a comment saying that <br> was deprecated, stating explicitly 
> that when upgrading from ׁ‎HTML4, <br> should be replaced with &ps; if 
> the intended
>     use was a hard break, or with &ls; if the intended use was 
> compliant with the HTML4 spec (i.e. soft break).

I have another concern here:

a) Let there be a bidi text containing <br>'s for some reason.
b) The same (kind of) text without <br>'s exists in, say, a table cell.
Now consider what happens if, in case b), the line-breaks caused by the 
cell width happen to be at the same place as the explicite <br>s in case a).

Should the display be LOGICALLY the same or not?
Can a user expect that this is logically the same?

This seems to be actually the case for HTML4. So, I think the existing 
<br> should not be deprecated.

Regards, Najib

-- 
Najib TOUNSI (tounsi at w3.org)
W3C Office in Morocco (http://www.w3c.org.ma/)
Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs, BP. 765 Agdal-RABAT Morocco
Phone : +212 (0) 537 68 71 50  Fax : +212 (0) 537 77 88 53
Mobile: +212 (0) 661 22 00 30

Received on Sunday, 7 November 2010 18:05:34 UTC