Re: [xml2rfc-dev] RFC 7991 issue #37: Schema Issue, RFC 7991, In Section 2.12, <br>

[Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]>]

Hi Julian,

On 2018-10-03 13:38, Julian Reschke wrote:
> On 10/3/2018 11:25 AM, Henrik Levkowetz wrote:
>> ...
>>> See Julian's response in the thread above. The WG decided
>> 
>> Umm?  Which WG? Could you point at the discussion?
> 
> "Design Team".

Ah.  That changes the weight of the argument a bit, though.

I think we're here now to revisit the choices made then, in the light
of experience with implementation and (even better, although not something
we could have counted on) some experience with using the v3 vocabulary,
provided by Miek.

>>> that it
>>> didn't like <br> because it causes the author to expect things that
>>> might not be true in all renderers, such as in the middle of section
>>> headings, as a run of <br><br>, and so on. However, there were many
>>> use cases for line breaks within a cell in a table because of the
>>> limitations on the horizontal space in cells.
>> 
>> I don't see this.  I think that if there are considerations which makes
>> <br> useful in for instance a 30-character width context which don't
>> apply in a 69-character width context or a flowing-text context on a
>> narrow screen, they need to be laid out explicitly.
> 
> How did you arrive at 30?

That's an arbitrary choice.  Insert your choice of width, and remember
that when rendering body text to html on a small device, the case could
be similar to the case for a table cell.

> Table cells can get very narrow, like just a few characters, and in that 
> case it can be desirable to control line breaks.

No, it doesn't help the argument that you repeat the statement.

I seriously want to be shown examples where <br> makes sense in a cell
and not in body text.

> FWIW, HTML5 *allows* <br> in many places, but says clearly that it's 
> only to be used when the line break has semantic meaning, such as in a poem.

But doesn't that approach make more sense that the current limitation?

Please note that my suggestion was to either remove <br> altogether, or
permit it in inline context consistently.  I don't care that much about
which choice we make, but I still haven't seen any concrete example that
shows why it makes sense to disallow it in one context, and not the other.


Best regards :-)

	Henrik



> 
> Best regards, Julian
>