[whatwg] [br] element should not be a line break

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Mon May 16 17:18:35 PDT 2011


On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, Christoph Päper wrote:
> Ian Hickson (2010-12-07):
> > On Thu, 26 Aug 2010, Christoph Päper wrote:
> >> However, I believe the underlying problem is simply that “line break” 
> >> is (too) often used and understood as a synonym for “new line”, at 
> >> least by non-native speakers. Speaking of breaks on line or paragraph 
> >> level therefore makes more sense to me.
> > 
> > I don't really understand the difference.
> 
> Here comes a *line break*
> that always means a visual *new line*
> like here, whereas a *break on line level* // may look differently
> – and may actually be rendered with orthographic possibilities (dashes, parentheses etc.) instead of markup, when they’re textual content, not structure.

I still don't understand what you mean here.


> >>> (A "minor logical break inside a paragraph" is not generally 
> >>> represented by a line break, at least not in any typographic 
> >>> conventions I've seen; usually, in my experience, those are denoted 
> >>> either using ellipses, em-dashes, or parentheses.)
> >> 
> >> That’s true for real paragraphs, but not for most “non-paragraphic” 
> >> texts, e.g. addresses.
> > 
> > The lines in an address are separate "oral lines", not "minor logical 
> > breaks inside a pragraph".
> 
> Addresses (with multpile lines) are a concept native to written, not to 
> spoken language.

Certainly addresses are, for their intended purpose, always written down, 
but that doesn't mean they're never read out. But I don't see how this 
affects this discussion.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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