[rfc-i] draft-iab-xml2rfc-03, "2.12 <br>"

[julian.reschke at gmx.de (Julian Reschke)]

On 2016-05-11 02:24, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> ...
>> Other than that:
>>
>> - What is "It is always expressed as <br />" about?
>
> So that we do not have the common problem in HTML that people use <br>
> unclosed.

a) That is not a problem in HTML, it's actually the right way to do it. 
It *is* a problem in XHTML.

b) Why call out <br/>? We are in XML land, this applies to *any* empty 
element.

>> - "Multiple successive instances of this element do not cause blank
>> lines to appear in the output, and is thus not useful." -- maybe "are
>> not useful" - or just state that they'll be ignored?
>
> Good call: ignored.
>
>> What if there's whitespace in between, such as with "<br/> <br/>"?
>
> Yeeps. That would indeed be a way to insert blank lines in a cell. I
> guess we should allow that in order not to create an arms war with
> people who want blank lines in their cells.
>
> Proposed:
>
> Multiple successive instances of this element are ignored. Successive
> instances with an
> intervening white space (such as "&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;") will
> create a single blank line.

Devils advocate: does this apply to *any* Unicode whitespace character?

Proposal: don't try to prevent this on the vocabulary level; but maybe 
mention that if you want a single empty line, "<t>" is the thing to use.


 > ...

Best regards, Julian