Re: <separator /> should be <transition />

Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Orion Adrian wrote:
>
>> <hr /> simply isn't staying unless the working group ignores the
>> coments from the past many years.
>
> The semantics an element have don't have to relate to its name. 
> Vertical languages can simply use <hr /> as its semantics are defined 
> as that of a separator.

On XTech Steven Pemberton mentioned <hr /> and <separator />, and 
basically the thing was that even though we can perhaps abstract it to 
‘any kind of separator’, not everyone can, they were actually getting a 
lot of requests for a <vr /> tag from Asian users. Also, hr said ‘rule’ 
which a separator doesn’t necessarily have to be, it can e.g. be three 
stars as well. So, to be done with it, the HTML WG decided to call it 
<separator />, which perfectly conveys the intended semantics. Or so I 
understood.

I agree with Orion that naming is incredibly important. I recall you 
mentioned that the XHTML 2 spec was unclear about what specific 
semantics certain tags were intended for. Naming things with improper 
names just for the sake of doing it the old way certainly doesn’t 
improve things in that respect, if you ask me.

> This would only help though if XHTML 2.0 becomes more backwards 
> compatible.

<separator/> can just as easily be styled to look as <hr/> for 
non-XHTML2 clients. And in practice it won’t be used that much anyway, 
so it isn’t such a big deal.

My opinion :).


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.

Received on Friday, 3 June 2005 21:21:59 UTC