Re: About XHTML 2.0

<l> is nice to have because it is nice to be able to address
individual lines, but if you didn't need to address the individual
lines, then br would do.

<seperator /> can work as is without a grouping structure because you
don't need to be able to address the peices it seperates
independantly. If you did you would need another grouping structure,
just not <section>.

I'm working on a paper on the purpose of naming. One conclusion I've
come to is that naming too many things actually detracts from
usability as it violates the 7 chunks rules (people can only contain
about 5-7 peices of information in short term memorty) and a name must
have a strong coorelation in the user's mind for it to be useful. Weak
correlations don't do that.

For another great use of seperator, take a look at your File menu.
There is a seperator in most menus between logical chunks of commands.
Each of these commands doesn't deserve their own name and if it did
the menu would become to weighty.

There are many cases where we wish to group options or simply seperate
the groups, but they are not sections.

So if you don't like <seperator /> than might I suggest <group>.
<group> would go around groups of things that have a light-weight
seperation between them. However I think <group> is more onerous on
the author than <seperator /> and doesn't provide any additional usage
that we would want. I wouldn't use <div> for <group> because of
<div>'s long history as a presentational element and its total lack of
semantics.

> On 5/23/05, Mikko Rantalainen <mikko.rantalainen@peda.net> wrote:
> >
> > Orion Adrian wrote:
> > > them all. They really do fall under the same classification as <sup>
> > > and <sub>. Still <seperator /> is necessary.
> >
> > There's one crucial difference between <sup>/<sub> and
> > <separator>/<hr>/<br>: the former have content but latter are always
> > empty.
> >
> > I thought that this was one of the major reasons to get rid of <br>
> > in favor to <l> element. This time, we're looking for separator
> > between elements instead of lines of text, but the same reasoning
> > still applies.
> >
> > As I wrote in another post, every time a <hr> or <separator> is
> > used, a <h> element could be instead to give the following part a
> > name. It's part of the presentation that the name of the part is not
> > displayed (and some authors think that because the name wouldn't get
> > displayed by default presentation, no name needs to be encoded in
> > the DOM either).
> >
> > The another possible use case for the <separator> is inside
> > navigation lists:
> >
> >    <nl>
> >      <label />
> >      <li />
> >      <li />
> >      <separator />
> >      <li />
> >    </nl>
> >
> > But in this case, too, I feel that it would be better for
> > non-sighted person that <separator> would be replaced with a <label>
> > to give name to the items that follow in the next part. If the <nl>
> > content model doesn't allow multiple <label> element that's the
> > problem we need to fix. Hiding some header or label from the user or
> > replacing it with a line or with a couple of stars is just part of
> > the presentation, IMHO.
> >
> > --
> > Mikko
> >
> >
>

Received on Monday, 23 May 2005 12:35:15 UTC