Re: separator/seperator Re: About XHTML 2.0

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Orion Adrian wrote:

> I'm curious: what does the 1st edition of "The Chicago Manual of
> Style" say, or what do the books on style say before Chicago existed.

That would be interesting on its own, but is it relevant here?

Surely the method of using something like "* * *" to separate paragraphs
groups is and old tradition. Style manuals didn't invent it; they
documented it. Whether it's "* * *" or "***" or "+ + + + +" is irrelevant,
a matter of styling, though a specification _could_ say something about
typical rendering of course (with the risk of being misunderstood as
normative).

> Is it our purpose only to mark up texted written in the 19th and 20th
> centuries and manuals only written in English then perhaps <pargroup>
> would work, but before going that route perhaps we should start asking
> people and start doing analysis of documents pre-1900 and see is this
> style guideline was always used. My gut instinct says no.

How would that be relevant?

The fact still is that books often use some separator between paragraphs.
You can interpret this in different ways, and you might question my view
that it is intended to present visually something that is logically a
division into groups of paragraphs. But then it would be interesting to
see your opinion on _what_ it is then. A "separator" is a vague term and
does not sound suitable in the context of logical markup.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Friday, 3 June 2005 13:09:26 UTC