Re: <HR>

I agree that the purist should go with div elements, and some kind of border
seperating them. I guess that is what is anticipated by the newer
specifications - I also recognise that in a visual rendering the line that
appears is extremely helpful.

Actually I thought hr stood for Have a Rest - in other words step back and
start in some slightly fresh context.

So, to rely on CSS, or to use hr for now - that is the question...

(at least as I see it)

Charles McCN

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

  [I've been wondering about this for ages now]

  > <hr> has a semantic meaning -

  My current thinking is that sometimes, <hr /> represents "new
  context". A horizontal rule is a separator between two less related
  parts of a document, hence the big horizontal rule in the way. It is
  unfortunate that it is called "hr", for "nc - or newcontext" would
  have been much better, but there you are.

  If you use it as a newcontext marker, you should set some kind of
  aural property as well:-

       hr { pause-before: 2s; }

  To show that it marks up a new context, or even play some kind of
  sound.

  I still don't often use "<hr />" preferring instead to use <div
  class="newcontext"> or <div class="islandcontext"> or whatever,
  because I'm a purist and I still see <hr /> as being defined [1] in
  HTML 4.01 [2] as a horizontal rule across the page, rather than a
  semantic element indicating a change in context.

  <hr /> is not included in XHTML Basic, and as part of the
  presentational module of XHTML m12n, I consider it to be deprecated.

  [1] "The HR element causes a horizontal rule to be rendered by visual
  user agents."
  [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401

  --
  Kindest Regards,
  Sean B. Palmer
  @prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
  :Sean :hasHomepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .


-- 
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Received on Thursday, 8 March 2001 12:42:03 UTC