RE: proposal for HTML4.01 amendment: <HR PAGEBREAK="before">

Hello Philip,

> -----Original Message-----
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 01:09:56PM +0100, Christian Wolfgang Hujer wrote:
> > * And now probably the most important argument against this (at
> least the
> > suggested solution with <br />) *
> >
> >
> > There is a technical reason why not to choose <br
> pagebreak="before" />. The
> > <br /> element is Inline markup, that means, it has to be within another
> > Flow markup. <br /> may not occur where only Block markup is allowed.
> >...
>
> ah. Thank-you for pointing this out.
>
> My proposal is therefore amended to be,
>
> "officially allow 'pagebreak=before' attribute for the HR tag" :->
which is an abuse of an element. "horizontal ruler" and "page break" -
shivering vibrations go down my shoulders on that semantically...

> Presumably, with the additional recommendation to treat the rest of the
> HR like an "alt" tag for an IMG:
>  Browsers that do not understand the pagebreak attribute, will render the
>  HR as a normal "horizontal rule", respecting all the width, etc
> attributes.
<hr /> has no with, size, align and noshade attributes anymore in XHTML
Basic 1.0 and XHTML 1.1.

>  Browsers that DO understand the pagebreak, shall merely cause the
>  appropriate behaviour for a "page break", instead of having to draw
>  a horizontal line.
>
> After all, HR is just a poor man's pagebreak to begin with. So time to
> upgrade it!
<hr/> has been excluded from XHTML Basic 1.0.
There's already was some discussion about the sense of <hr/>, I think.

> [I updated the email Subject: line to match]
>
> >I interpret pagebreaks as style as well, and while colors are
> restricted to
> >all colorful media (screen, TV, projector, tty, print etc. if
> it's not grey
> >(green etc.) scale or b/w) and fonts are restricted to all scalable media
> >(screen, TV, projector, print etc.), page breaks are restricted to print
> >only, so they are a quite media specific style.
>
> How are you getting "page breaks are restricted to print only" ??
> I just pointed out an example where page breaks are used in ELECTRONIC
> media: in the 'more' program.
I've never seen page breaks in more or less. I only see documents like man
pages that assume an 80 lines per page.
Perhaps I should try including a form feed in an ASCII document to get that
behaviour.

Page breaks in ttys or on the screen (like in Acrobat Reader) are just the
on-screen visualization of page breaks intended for print media.


> Besides which, the question should NOT be "are page breaks only currently
> used in print media?" The question should be, "are page breaks potentially
> useful in browsers, other than purely for printing purposes?"
That's a different topic, but although interesting, sounds like a retreat, a
defense, a running fight ;)

> I say yes, because the "page" metaphore extends beyond simply the printed
> page: it is useful for the concept of a browser "window" also.
I do not want to agree on that.
The page metaphore already exists for a browser window and is simply
represented by a HTML file. Other interpretations will result in big chaos
and introduce many new problems like frames did.

> For the physical medium, a page break signifies,
> "I dont know or care how large a page is, but this stuff coming next
>  belongs at the start of a clean page"
> For the electronic medium, a 'page' break cleanly translates to
> "I dont know or care how large your browser window is, but this stuff
>  coming next belongs at the start of a fresh scroll area"
That's okay, but I can't see any usage except for inadequately waste of
screen space. Isn't it enough that most sites already waste space left and
right in a way that you ask yourself 'why the **** did I spend xyz € or $ on
a 21" and a 64 MB graphics card when all those web pages only use 25% of my
display even in full screen mode of Opera/IE/Konqueror/etc.?!'?

A visual distance using something like h2 { margin-top:5em; } in a
stylesheet is enough I think. I cannot imagine a different purpose.
But wether page breaks are useful for screen media or not, it's a layout
topic and a CSS property for that purpose already exists h2 {
page-break-before: always }.


Greetings

Christian

Received on Saturday, 12 January 2002 08:07:55 UTC