Re: Structure and Style revisited

At 12:24 AM 2/23/99 +0100, Chris Lilley dared to say:
>By moving away from "putting the breaks in" and towards "why did the
>author want hard breaks" we are more likely to get a general, robust and
>declarative solution, it seems to me.

I think <br> means roughly the same thing as what I think is called a
"soft return" in word processors:  "this line of text ends here, but the
paragraph doesn't".  One *ML solution to this is to allow a paragraph to
be optionally broken up into lines:

   <p>
   <line>The Old Man</line>
   <line>and</line>
   <line>The Sea</line>
   </p>

(In fact, if the element were named "BR", using the same kind of tag
minimization that browsers have always done, you could almost say that
this is already the case...although of course DTDs have never been
written that way.)

This notation is a little bit cumbersome, but it sure works well (I
think) for dealing with line breaks in style sheets.

mag
-- 
///X  Tom Magliery, Research Programmer           217-333-3198  .---o
\\\   NCSA, 605 E. Springfield      O-       mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu  `-O-.
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Received on Monday, 22 February 1999 21:47:38 UTC