- From: William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- Date: 15 Apr 2003 10:11:57 -0400
- To: W3C HTML Specification Discussion <www-html@w3.org>
Herr Christian Wolfgang Hujer <Christian.Hujer@itcqis.com> writes:
> > (a) the l element is purely presentational: it _is_ a line. It's not less
> > presentational than <br/>.
> <address>
> <l>name</l>
> <l>street</l>
> <l>city</l>
> <l>zip</l>
> <l>country</>
> </address>
Yes, good example.
> > (b) it is useful only when you have a list of adjacent lines. So it's
> > basically a list (ul/ol) with list items (li) having no marker and no
> > wrapping.
> Yes.
> But isn't <p>text<br/>text</p> always a list of adjacent lines? ;-)
No. If a <p> has children other than <l>, then the use of <l> is
less desirable than using <br> for an _occasional_ forced line break.
Typical <p> instances should not be divided into <l> children and
using an occasional <l> in that context would be grotesque. Imagine,
for example, a renderer (perhaps a user agent with the user's CSS
sheet) that is geared to number all <l>s inside a given <p>.
Those who focus on past abusive use of <br> should be mindful of the
current abusive excess of forced width displays and the possibility
that <l class="styledToNowrap"> is a likely forthcoming abuse if
<l> is overly promoted.
> <p class="code">
> <l>public class Hello {</l>
> <l> public static void main(String[] args) {</l>
> <l> System.out.println("hello, world");</l>
> <l> }</l>
> <l>}</l>
> </p>
Yes, good example. Even though at the level of abstract markup this
is a list structure, its semantic nature is little different from
classical "lines" since the cited program is not itself a list
structure.
Another example: <p class="legalText"> with <l> children would be
good for representing certain legal documents in HTML where specific
lines are important.
The question of whether proposed markup is content or presentation
must be weighed in view of the fact that XHTML2 is being designed as
the future default translation target for re-scalable and re-sizable
online representations of other XML document types such as TEI or
W3C-Spec. In that sense XHTML2 itself has a presentational role to
fill.
-- Bill
Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2003 10:12:00 UTC