Just couldn't resist answering to this particular one.

2004-11-04T14:01:19+03:00 Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

> On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:

>> I agree that by design, <hr> is presentational. But it needn't be.

> By original design, <hr> is structural, though with a misleading name:
> "The HR element is a divider between sections of text"
> http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC5.9 
> (and admittedly the designers added: "typically a full
> width horizontal rule or equivalent graphic"; but they also described
> typical rendering of headings, and yet nobody claims they designed
> h1, h2 etc. to be presentational).

As I have said many times before the hr element (and even its name) is
purely presentational. A separator alone cannot have meaning. A
separator needs to separate *something* from *something*. The pieces
that are separated should be marked up, it's an error to mark up some
mystical space between them, in my opinion.

>> I don't think <hr> is very useful in XHTML 2.0, but in XHTML 1.x and HTML
>> it certainly was, to some respect. Not just as a visual horisontal ruler,
>> but also as a content separator or divider.

> Just dropping <hr> is a mistake. It can be omitted, if equivalent or
> better markup is available. But sectioning is a different issue.

Sectioning is not an issue, as I see it, but a step forward.

> Consider a page that currently ends with some notes about the history
> of the page, author, last update, etc., preceded by
> <hr title="About this page">
> which helps the user note that there's a change of topic even though there
> is no heading. What would you do in XHTML 2.0? It's really not a
> <section>, is it?

Why not? It is a small section. The role of the hr element in this
case is mimicing the heading element. Why don't you write it as:

<section>
 <h>About this page</h>
 <p>...your stuff...</p>
</section>

or

<section title="About this page">
  <p>...your stuff...</p>
</section>

> Besides, even if you use <section> markup, so what?

So nothing, you just use the <section> markup.

> Are
> browsers expected to indicate start of section in a particular way?

The spec should describe this.

> Will that be useful in general?

Rhetorical one?

> Of course you can use CSS to draw a line or
> something, just as you can do now (a top border for a <div> element,
> for example). But then you would rely on CSS in separating parts of the
> content.

That's wrong, you're rather relying on the markup in this case. The
text is made independent from the medium. Today it is a line between
the sections that separates them, tomorrow you decide that a smaller
font size will help to distinguish one from another etc.

Alexander
-- 
  Alexander Savenkov                            http://www.xmlhack.ru/ 
  savenkov@x...             http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/