Re: [XHTML2] Unicode line and paragraph separators

> No, &ls; would not be the same as <br/>. There are several important 
> differences.  As an entity, the only thing that &ls; could do would be 
> to indicate a new line.  On the other hand <br/> is an element. As 
> such, <br/> has a separate node in the DOM tree which takes up much 
> more memory than the single 16-bit character that &ls; would use.  

The previous paragraph is making an awful lot of assumptions about how the
document is being processed, and seems to be missing the point of using
marked up text at all. If you want a really efficient format with line
breaks and paragraph separators, simply send plain UNICODE text, in the
encoding of your choice. No markup, no tags, very efficient.

> As for "bad" pages that use <br/> instead of appropriate semantic 
> markup, all that will happen if the <l></l> markup is used in XHTML2 is 
> that authors (and authoring agents) that now use <br/> instead of 
> semantic markup will use <l></l> instead of semantic markup. You can 
> lead a monkey to a typewriter, but you can't make him write  
> Shakespeare.

I believe <br/> and <l/> would not have the same effect.

	Hello, world!<br/>
	Goodbye, world!

	Hello, world!<l/>
	Goodbye, world!

In the first example, the <br/> simply ends the line. In the second 
example, there is a blank line separating the two lines of text.

Michael

Received on Friday, 4 April 2003 21:31:09 UTC