Re: Style rules to emulate BR (was: HR)

On Sun, 18 Feb 2001, Jan Roland Eriksson wrote:
>
>> This group has a long history of shooting down proposed CSS rules for
>> styling the default look of <br> elements, so I figured here would be
>> the best place to ask:
>>
>> What is wrong with the following?
>
> (you mean except from the fact that it has nothing to do with HR ? :)

Heh. Typo, sowwy! :-)


>>   br {
>>     display: block;
>>   }
>
> Well, there's nothing to apply a style to in the first place.
> Or are you thinking of a possibility to apply style to a control
> character? Can a control char really be thought of as occupying a
> character cell box?

<br/> is an empty element, just like <foo/> and <bar/>. It is not a
control character. Maybe you were thinking of <br> as an entity reference?


> Browsers are supposed to interpret a BR as a command to move the next
> point of content rendering to a 'new line'.

No, browsers are free to interpret <br> however they like, the semantics
of the element per HTML4 are "The BR element forcibly breaks (ends) the
current line of text".


> If the clear attribute is used in addition, the command needs to be
> given a further level of interpretation to find the next 'new line'
> where the value of the clear attribute is satisfied.

That's non-normative ("can be used"). But that's the idea, yes.


> But no where in this process I can see a stylable box to be generated.

Every element is stylable in CSS, including <br>, <meta> and <script> (to
give a few examples).


> Btw, this "works" as something of a BR replacement in Win Moz 0.7
>
> In your stylesheet...
>
>   SPAN.sbr       { white-space: pre; }
>   SPAN.sbr:after { content: "\A"; }
>
> And in your markup...
>
>   <P>Some text here<SPAN CLASS="sbr"></SPAN
>     >Some more text that will appear on a next line of its own.</P>

Right. But that doesn't cover the semantics of "clear". I was wondering if
my proposed rules would cover both -- can you see any reason why not?

-- 
Ian Hickson                                     )\     _. - ._.)       fL
Netscape, Standards Compliance QA              /. `- '  (  `--'
+1 650 937 6593                                `- , ) -  > ) \
irc.mozilla.org:Hixie _________________________  (.' \) (.' -' __________

Received on Sunday, 18 February 2001 06:08:39 UTC