Re: XHTML 2.0 considered harmful

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Daniel Glazman wrote:
> 
>>I think that <br/> cannot be replaced by <l>. Read the following
>>
>>http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/archived/2003_01_12_glazblogarc.html#87473606
> 
> This example is a good example of abuse of the <br> element. Semantically,
> ... ...

I agree. It seems that those who prefer br over l are the same ones that 
want to keep the style attribute. This far, every example for the need 
of br and/or style attribute has only demonstrated that the author of 
that specific example hasn't really understood semantic markup.

If you feel that you have to use br or style attribute try to think for 
a second what's the reason you "need" those. Think about *why* you're 
trying to achieve the line break or specific styling, not *what* you're 
trying to achieve.

> On the other hand, valid uses for <br> all map directly into uses of
> the <l>...</l> element:
> 
>    Poems <br/>                 <l> Poems </l>
> ...
I fully agree with the examples here. Another reasonable example would 
be to markup every line of a computer program represented in a XHTML 
document with l elements to allow intelligent wrapping. One could add 
CSS style to indent wrapped lines or something.


> Your third conclusion is one of esthetics and education. Personally I
> find it much easier to think of a line than a line break, and I think

And what comes to teaching a document markup language to new people, 
XHTML2 looks like much simpler as a whole than XHTML1.x. Don't talk 
about the tags when you're teaching new users--talk about elements 
instead. You might mention that the character strings that are used to 
mark element's beginning and end are sometimes called "tags". That's all 
they need to know. The biggest problem seems to be those who know 
something about older HTML versions--and have learned to break some 
rules to work around browser bugs.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 10:06:13 UTC