Re: Structural Markup / SPACER vs. other markup

The major problem with SPACER, outside of any discussion of compliance
with standards and Netscape vs. Microsoft, is that it's not intuitive.
If one thinks of it like a blank image, you expect to give it WIDTH and
HEIGHT attributes. But this only applies if you choose TYPE=block. If
you use TYPE=horizontal or TYPE=vertical, instead of WIDTH, you specifiy
SIZE. SIZE is much too generic. I can't even see how using this tag can
be made easy in an HTML editor if you have to go through this series of
confusing choices. 

Conclusion: SPACER will probably die. But I expect to see this
functionality reappear in yet another form, because it does indeed
answer a need. It would be nice if we could say the style sheets are
indeed simpler, but in fact, all of the proposed alternatives for "the
little lame baloonman" are just as cumbersome to code, with the
exception of the creative uses of <PRE>. But I think the discussion with
that concrete example was useful.

Gayle Kidder

Received on Thursday, 4 July 1996 11:54:16 UTC