[whatwg] Re: About XHTML 2.0

[Christoph Päper]

Ian Hickson schrieb:
> 
> I read a lot of fiction books and when I come across a "* * *" it reads to 
> me like a paragraph, saying "Meanwhile, in a different part of the 
> universe:"; it doesn't read as "end section. new section:".

   <section>
     ...
     <div class="pov Foo">...</div>
     <!-- 'plot', 'note', 'loc', 'place', 'time', 'story' ... -->
     <!-- former place of 'hr' in disguise -->
     <div class="pov Bar">...</div>
     <!-- former place of 'hr' in disguise -->
     <div class="pov Foo">...</div>
     ...
   </section>

Works have either just one plot or more which are either parallel (like 
the example above) or nested (where the top-most doesn't need to be 
stuffed into a 'div'). Correct mark-up (in inadequate presentation) 
could destroy the reader's pleasure, though, when the author wants to 
keep the recipient in the dark about what point of view a certain part 
really belongs to.

> To put it another way, sections are things that you can put a title to. 

'div' is the proper HTML element type for subdivisions (of sections) 
that actually are not sections. (IMO sections always have a heading, 
'h'.) It, optionally, can be categorized with the 'class' attribute and 
be identified by an 'id' attribute.

> There's no title you can put to a group of paragraphs separated from other 
> groups of paragraphs in the same chapter of a work of fiction, in my 
> experience.

Anyhow you can still group paragraphs by wrapping them in a division 
instead of dividing them by a separator. The latter is IMO not a very 
markupish approach. MLs are usually about putting (informational) atoms 
into bags and these into larger ones, iterated until you reach the top 
one, the root.