Re: new type of <br>

> IMO This would not be a good idea, because now you have a conditional =
> element and not mark up.

My understanding is that your reply and the original question are based
on a mis-understanding that the common visual browsers implement br
correctly.  They have basically a word processor heritage, and treat it
as a hard newline, whereas my understanding is that the intention was
that it should behave like .br in troff, and the equivalent in TeX,
and force out any incompletely constructed line, but otherwise be
ignored; this is not quite what was being asked for here, but would
have almost the same effect.

However, this request is expressed in purely presentational terms, and
in fact, even the existence of the current br is sometime considered
undesirable because its structural meaning is unclear.  The proposal
really belongs in www-css, although what is probably really needed there
is a better definition of what a newline escape in generated content
means, as, on the few times I've read it, I couldn't work out whether
it was intended to behave like the original br, or the GUI browser
de facto redefinition.

PS Please avoid multipart/alternate on public mailing lists; the HTML
is invariably broken, anyway.

Received on Tuesday, 4 March 2003 02:11:13 UTC