Re: Comments on XHTML 2.0 Working Draft

The following text was discovered Thursday 08 August 2002 in a note
attributed to one "Jonas Jørgensen <jonasj@jonasj.dk>":
> Every argument for deprecating <br> in favor of <line> also applies to 
> deprecating <hr> in favor of <section>. The only structural use for <hr> 
> is as a section separator -- just like <br> is a line separator. With 
> XHTML 2.0, we have the <line> and <section> elements for marking up 
> lines and sections, thus <br> and <hr> are not needed anymore. <br> is 
> deprecated -- why not <hr>?

The only reasonable justification I can think of (and the reason why I still
use it myself :) ) is that one might want to have a separator of a width
different than that of the sections immediately before and/or after. And CSS
level 2 doesn't let you control a border-top or border-bottom's length
independent of the block's width, so you'd have to put in a separate <div>
with the desired width specifically for that purpose.

<hr> is just faster, and it also has the same effect in non-CSS capable web
browser UAs, so it helps to restore my conscience after having shafted NS4.
:)

(I still occasionally use <i> for the same purpose - when there's no
semantic markup for something I want that I'm going to style in that manner
anyways, I use such an element instead of a <span> element. They're pretty
much semantically equivalent, anyways.)


-- 
Joanne Hunter <http://menagerie.tf/~jrhunter/>  Say No to HTML Mail!/"\
 Of course, I don't know how interesting any of this really is,     \ /
 but now you've got it in your brain cells so you're stuck with it.  X
      --Gary Larson                            ASCII Ribbon Campaign/ \

Received on Thursday, 8 August 2002 21:55:55 UTC