Re: Structure and Style revisited

Chris Lilley said:

> 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.

Here's some data--all the situations in which I use <br>:

At the end of the last TD in a TR so that browsers incapable of
rendering tables will at least put a line break after each row.

In a table of contents, which is a single paragraph composed of multiple
lines, each of which is a link.  (Okay, I admit, it's more like a list,
and I just didn't want the bullets.  I suppose the right way to do this
is to make it an ordered list and use style sheets to suppress the
numbers.)

In a postal address, which is an honest-to-goodness sequence of lines.

In a series of examples, each of which consisted of a pair of related
items, one of which was an RFC-822 header field, which needed to be on a
line by itself.  Each example was a paragraph.

In the description of me on my welcome page:

    Graduate Student
    Computer Science Division
    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
    University of California at Berkeley 

Similarly, in attributions of papers etc:

    <h1>title of paper</h1>
    <p>author
    <br>organization
    <br>date

In a list where the items are short names or phrases, and occasionally
an item needs an additional explanatory sentence that's not part of the
name/phrase.  The additional sentence is not a separate paragraph, so I
separate it from the name/phrase using <br>.

Just before a <strong>Warning</strong> that's very closely related to
the preceeding sentence, so I don't want to begin a new paragraph,
but the word "Warning" will be more eye-catching if it appears at the
margin.

In nested lists where the inner items are small and sub-bullets would
be more distracting than helpful.  The inner "list" isn't really an
HTML list, just <br>-separated text.  This is similar to the table of
contents case above, and likewise it should really be a real list, with
style sheets to suppress the inner bullets.

In this instance:

    <p>This is a slash: /
    <br>This is a backslash: \

AMC

Received on Monday, 22 February 1999 23:09:16 UTC