In article <012c01c0a1ed$ad8bdf40$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Lennon Day-Reynolds) wrote:
> Wouldn't it be preferable to use an element that didn't have a direct
> visual rendering, like a named anchor or empty div tag, rather than
> inserting line breaks all over the place?
The br tag does not cause any visual rendering in these instances. The
other tags you mention would be truly odd to scatter around a document,
and would not have the desired effect of producing a frame in layout in
which to draw the caret.
> If not, it seems as though it
> wouldn't be terribly difficult to assign some attribute to those instances
> of the <br> tag that were added automatically, so that they could be removed
> before a file was saved to disk.
We thought about that. We could still do it. But it opens us up to
more runtime difficulty. The user may make use of the breaks in a way
that becomes relavent (such as adding another break right after it, to
get a blank line). Then stripping them out would be wrong. It would be
a headache to figure out per each editting operation which breaks needed
to be un-attributed.
Leaving them in annoys some folks, but otherwise has no severe effects.
The document renders the same. It doesn't bloat typical documents
badly. It solves an important selection problem.
If you want to turn the heat up on someone, go to the layout group and
tell them to generate frames for us in these circumstances. Then we
won't need this hack.
--
jfrancis .com -and- floppymoose .net
@netscape @netscape
