Re: separator/seperator Re: About XHTML 2.0

What I meant to get accross, but clearly didn't was that the technical
descriptions of documents seems to be a fairly recent thing. And I
believe that many of the writings throughout history probably don't
follow the Chicago Manual of Style. The Chicago Manual of Style and
other works like it don't simply describe what the use of separators
are, they find the most common use and standardize on them.

We still haven't gotten past the issue that pargroup adds an
additional layer of depth in some places and not in others or adds it
to all places which seems silly when all I wanted was a simple
separation or transition.

I haven't heard compelling evidence for the need to address pargroups.
I find the idea of different background colors for different groups to
be insufficient when div and class will do the job. I'm talking about
two things 1) what HTML can specify by itself without CSS and 2) what
additional difficulties it places on popular tools and languages by
adding that feature.

We're moving into dangerous territory here by introducing an HTML
construct that can't be easily addressed. How does one style
non-content or implied content? Are we to make a special CSS class for
it? How would you specify the default presentation of the non-existent
element between elements. Now ask yourself how on earth I'm going to
specify that I want different types of separators for whatever reason.
Now I can't style them at all because I can't address them unless of
course I'm addressing them through the pargroups that surround it.
Isn't this all very dangerous and inconsistent precendence?

<br /> was bad because I never wanted to address the break, but
instead I wanted to address the lines. <pargroup> is bad because I
don't want to address the groups, but I want to address the break.

There are no truths here, only statistical realities. Trying to
determine truth here is a silly notion. There are no a priori when
talking about people.

Orion Adrian

On 6/3/05, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> 
> 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 13:31:34 UTC