Re: BR element and generated content

Alex Mogilevsky wrote:

> * BR is defined in HTML as an empty element. It can't have any conent

As an aside, BR historically had the same effect as the break commands 
in TeX and troff.  It was only when GUI browsers started being written 
that, de facto, it got redefined as being equivalent to a word processor 
hard newline.

The distinction is that break commands do nothing if one is already at 
the start of a line (have no text pending justification), so, in 
particular, multiple consecutive BRs are equivalent to a single one. 
There is also an element of this in the recent HTML specifications of P 
elements, which say that empty P elements should be ignored.  Neither of 
these behaviours are, in practice, implemented in GUI browsers.


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David Woolley
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Received on Saturday, 13 October 2007 09:19:14 UTC