Re: separator/seperator

Not all separations will be perspecive changes. Many won't be and it
gets pretty ugly when you start diving all over. As people who deal
with the technology we like the idea of everything fitting neatly into
little boxes, but these boxes are abitrary composed by decisions in
language. What may make sense to us here doesn't make sense in another
language.

So let's not assume that there is some absolutism because semantics
all comes down to language.

Authors over an amazing number of years have used things like
* * *
to add to comprehension of their document. The text above and below
doesn't necessarily have a commonality, but the author has decided
that there should be a separation between the two bodies of text. It's
really not the place of the W3C to say, "you must only seperate things
into logical groups of the same type that we can understand."

Taking the following example (lifted from another post):

X
 A
 B
 Separator
 C

Moving A and B into a subelement Y and C into a subelement Z
fundamentally changes the semantics of A, B and C in ways I may not
want to. For example A, B and C are no longer siblings. Expanding on
this setup to:

X
 Y
   A
   B
 Z
   C
W
 D

My intention was that A, B, C and D (say E2) all be the same depth
that they all be direct children of the class of element that is X and
W (say E1).

There is no way to address E2 with the child sibling alone. If you
remove Y and Z and replace it with a seperator it simply becomes E1 >
E2 which is what I wanted in the first place.

Before calling for the use of <div> please deal with this issue.



On 5/23/05, Johannes Koch <koch@w3development.de> wrote:
> 
> Laurens Holst wrote:
> > Seriously though, I like having as much semantic tags as I need for
> > marking up a document. Maybe for a common web document (e.g. a blog or a
> > manual) a separator isn't as useful because the construct isn't usually
> > used, but for other types of documents (e.g. online books) it is. Of
> > course everything can be styled with spans and divs with classnames, but
> > I prefer not to :).
> >
> > And to create container elements for this kind of things instead of
> > making an element which represents what they really are (separators) -
> > nah. It doesn't contain, it separates.
> 
> Why is the separator there in a visual presentation (readable book)?
> Because e.g. the perspective changes. I.e. one block of text as one
> perspective, the following has another.
> 
> --
> Johannes Koch
> In te domine speravi; non confundar in aeternum.
>                              (Te Deum, 4th cent.)
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2005 00:37:20 UTC