On Tuesday 31 July 2007 18:47:09 Thomas Dalton wrote:
A logical box is exactly want you want to mark a chapter. I can't see a logical reason to have a break inbetween 2 items rather than a box around each.
Ok, once again. Take this example:
--begin--
[[Image:bla.jpeg|thumb|blubb]] lala I am some cool text...
== Chapter 1 == blind text blind text blind text blind text blind text blind text blind text blind text blind text
[[Image:foo.jpeg|thumb|bar]] some more blind text some more blind text some more blind text some more blind text <br style="clear:both;" />
== Chapter 2 == lalala here is the next nonsense text.
--end--
The image bla.jpeg shall flow into Chapter 1 but foo.jpeg shall _not_ flow into Chapter 2. You cannot solve this with a div around Chapter 1, cause in that case bla.jpeg also can't flow into Chapter 1.
This arbitrary break is meant as an exemption from the normal useful concise element positioning. You sometimes simply need it.
Furthermore HTML has a fundamental design flaw for human editing. Most HTML tags need open and close tags. In contrast a lot of wiki elements don't need closing tags, they close implicit. This is very good at editing cause you don't need to keep in mind closing a tag from 10 screen pages above. So wiki allows for linear editing while HTML definitely does not allow for linear editing.
A div is such a flawed element that prevents linear editing (beside the fact that div is not appropriate in my above example).
(Also take a look at LaTex. LaTex is a very good example for semantic page description. Like wiki syntax LaTex tries to avoid explicit open an close tags wherever possible in order to allow for linear and concise editing.)
So as others in this thread have noted this currently widley existing habbit using br in wiki pages is _bad_ because it is no semantic markup and cause it has a special meaning in HTML and does not necessarily make perfect sense in other medias that's why I was suggesting a special wiki tag (that also is short and does not have different ways of writing it).
\ for a simple line break (in HTML <br />, in a word processor the return character) = for an all elements break (in HTML <br style="clear:both;" />, in a word processor the page return/break).
And if you really want a bit more flexibility you maybe can have these two line breaks, too:
- that would render n HTML as <br style="clear:left;" /> + that would render n HTML as <br style="clear:right;" />
br in all its valid and invalid variants is currently heavily used in Wikipedia and is the most used HTML element in wiki pages (more than div, sub and sup). You are simply not able to stop using people breaks. You can only improve the situation with intruducing a concise and logical wiki element (which also makes the life easier transfoming the wiki source code into other medias such as books). This would make curent wiki source code more human readable (beside more concise).
Arnomane