Re: separator abuse

And how, praytell, do you expect to determine where the viewer is
reading at the time? If this is an aural reader I don't think playing
sound would be very popular.

I cannot stress this enough. The usage of separator doesn't
necessarily comply with any sort of regular organization.

It's content, not structure, and as such could have a near infininte
number of reasons for use. Content cannot be regulated as its usage
changes from generation to generation.

Organization however tends to be similar from generationto generation
which means one set of markup can cover most organizational structures
for documents throughout the ages.

There is also nothing that prevents a person from using <section>,
<div> and <separator /> together. If there is an aspect of the
document that is regular that can be addressed in such a way, a <div>
with an appropriate class attribute should suffice, but that use case
is much rarer than the use case for a generic <separator /> element.

Even if no one ever used a separator (e.g. ~~~) ever again there would
still be a huge number of documents that would require it.

Why separators are used where they are used cannot necessarily be
known. Since they cannot be represented by a concrete set of words, we
can only guess at why there were used where they were used. It is also
not the place of the W3C to dictate how content is written, simply how
it is marked up. No one should be suggesting the removal of the
authors ability to simply place a separator where they think it's
appropriate.

Authors often don't know why they write what they write, so asking
them to determine why they placed the three tildes isn't particularly
an easy thing to ask of them.

Now I want to note that I never said we shouldn't rename this
construct. If we don't like separator, how about <transition />.

Orion Adrian 

On 6/1/05, Christoph Päper <christoph.paeper@tu-clausthal.de> wrote:
> Orion Adrian:
> 
> > The parts above and the parts below the <separator /> don't
>  > need to be addressed independantly, given <section> or <ul>.
> 
> How can you be certain about that? How do you know you don't want to be
> able to easily extract all pieces of a certain POV/scenery/timeline/...
> out of a work one day? Why should you forever use a horizontal rule or
> border to /separate/ two parts when you'd rather use background colors
> and images (or sounds and music or movies).
> 
> We don't want to say: "Stop the ocean waves sound¹ at 'separator' and
> start with the birds' singing²," but: "Play the ocean waves sound for
> the first part and the birds' singing for the second."
> 
> ¹ That was started when?
> ² That will end when?
>

Received on Thursday, 2 June 2005 14:49:44 UTC