Re: <HR>

[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/> .

Received on Thursday, 8 March 2001 11:49:27 UTC