Re: line breaks vs. line elements (comments on XHTML 2.0 text module)

math { display:block }

No need for a purely presentational <br/> in this example.

Next...

Tantek


On 11/6/02 4:47 PM, "Peter Sheerin" <pete@petesguide.com> wrote:

> 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 13:31:40 UTC