- From: Alexander Savenkov <savenkov@xmlhack.ru>
- Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:23:15 +0000
- To: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Cc: HTML List <www-html@w3.org>
Just couldn't resist answering to this particular one. 2004-11-04T14:01:19+03:00 Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote: > On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote: >> I agree that by design, <hr> is presentational. But it needn't be. > By original design, <hr> is structural, though with a misleading name: > "The HR element is a divider between sections of text" > http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC5.9 > (and admittedly the designers added: "typically a full > width horizontal rule or equivalent graphic"; but they also described > typical rendering of headings, and yet nobody claims they designed > h1, h2 etc. to be presentational). As I have said many times before the hr element (and even its name) is purely presentational. A separator alone cannot have meaning. A separator needs to separate *something* from *something*. The pieces that are separated should be marked up, it's an error to mark up some mystical space between them, in my opinion. >> I don't think <hr> is very useful in XHTML 2.0, but in XHTML 1.x and HTML >> it certainly was, to some respect. Not just as a visual horisontal ruler, >> but also as a content separator or divider. > Just dropping <hr> is a mistake. It can be omitted, if equivalent or > better markup is available. But sectioning is a different issue. Sectioning is not an issue, as I see it, but a step forward. > Consider a page that currently ends with some notes about the history > of the page, author, last update, etc., preceded by > <hr title="About this page"> > which helps the user note that there's a change of topic even though there > is no heading. What would you do in XHTML 2.0? It's really not a > <section>, is it? Why not? It is a small section. The role of the hr element in this case is mimicing the heading element. Why don't you write it as: <section> <h>About this page</h> <p>...your stuff...</p> </section> or <section title="About this page"> <p>...your stuff...</p> </section> > Besides, even if you use <section> markup, so what? So nothing, you just use the <section> markup. > Are > browsers expected to indicate start of section in a particular way? The spec should describe this. > Will that be useful in general? Rhetorical one? > Of course you can use CSS to draw a line or > something, just as you can do now (a top border for a <div> element, > for example). But then you would rely on CSS in separating parts of the > content. That's wrong, you're rather relying on the markup in this case. The text is made independent from the medium. Today it is a line between the sections that separates them, tomorrow you decide that a smaller font size will help to distinguish one from another etc. Alexander -- Alexander Savenkov http://www.xmlhack.ru/ savenkov@xmlhack.ru http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Received on Thursday, 4 November 2004 21:28:30 UTC