RE: line breaks vs. line elements (comments on XHTML 2.0 text mod ule)

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the problem that you are describing, but it
seems to me that this solution would work:

<p>The displacements of the membrane
under load are described by the equations
<line>
<math>
[two fancy math expressions were here]
</math>
</line>
where r is the radial coordinate, a is the
radius of the clamping edge, w is the
transverse...</p>

Accorind to the XHTML Text Module
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-text.html#edef_text_line)
"It contains a piece of text that when visually represented should start on
a new line, and have a line break at the end. Whether the line should wrap
or not visually depends on styling properties of the element"

I'm not sure I understand your description of the problem.

-Peter Foti



-----Original Message-----
From: www-html-request@w3.org [mailto:www-html-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of Peter Sheerin
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2002 7:48 PM
To: html-w3c
Subject: line breaks vs. line elements (comments on XHTML 2.0 text
module)


There has been some discussion recently about the plan to 
deprecate the <br />
tag in XHTML 2.0 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-text.html#sec_8.5.). At the
time, I had an uneasy felling that while the intentions were 
valid and laudable,
there were likely some cases where the difference in behavior would be
important--but I couldn't think of any at the time.

But I think I've found a good reason for keeping <br />. In 
writing content that
has images, equations, or other figures embedded inside a 
paragraph (where said
figure takes up the entire column width), there is a need to 
force a linebreak
to make sure that space is left for the figure and so that text 
justification
may occur. A line element will not work here, because it forces 
you to know in
advance where the preceding automatic line break is, so that 
you can enclose the
appropriate range of text in the line element--not desireable 
or possible when
the content can reflow whenever the UA's window is resized.

For example, consider the following (I came across this while 
trying to typeset
an article from NASA Tech Briefs [Sep. 1999, p.52], in a test 
of using XHTML +
MathML + SVG.)

----------------------------------------------
     The displacements of the membrane
under load are described by the equations

[two fancy math expressions were here]

where r is the radial coordinate, a is the
radius of the clamping edge, w is the
transverse...
----------------------------------------------

So, in XHTML, this would be:

<p>The displacements of the membrane
under load are described by the equations<br />
<math>
[two fancy math expressions were here]
</math>
where r is the radial coordinate, a is the
radius of the clamping edge, w is the
transverse...</p>

In the printed version of the article, the text before the 
equations are printed
as two lines, but since you can't know that in advance for the 
XHTML version, I
don't see how the <line> element could ever duplicate this behavior.

Received on Thursday, 7 November 2002 12:58:32 UTC