Comments on: The small & hr elements

By: Chris H

Chris H — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 07:49:52 +0000

Personally, I hate using i and b, and I hate it when I see them used incorrectly in someone else's source. The HTML5 spec isn't very unambiguous, so I'm always debating with myself which to use. One week I think b is appropriate, then I think back on it and decide i is better. They should just get rid of them completely and use spans for stylistic offset.

By: Oli Studholme

Oli Studholme — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:13:52 +0000

@Mark Boughter — completely agree, but this is what history has given us to work with Hopefully the new definition (and this article) will make deciding when to use

easier.

By: Mark Boughter

Mark Boughter — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:20:56 +0000

I see what you mean. I suppose my gripe should be with the name of the original tag. Perhaps it should have been called, more generically, “separator” instead of “hr” in the first place.

It seems I’ve always incorrectly considered its semantic meaning to be “draw a line here” causing me to avoid its use altogether due to what I considered its presentational nature. Questions that always came to mind were “is a flourish to be considered a horizontal rule?” and “shouldn’t I just use a border-bottom instead?”.

By: Oli Studholme

Oli Studholme — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:58:05 +0000

@Mark Boughter — presentational-only elements have been dropped from HTML5 (well, arguably If

didn’t have a semantic meaning it would have been made obsolete. As Alohci points out this is more a (very minor) realigning than a repurposing. Adding new elements is not to be done lightly either — it increases complexity, and requires updates to tools and browsers. Any new element will literally take years to achieve wide native support.

Have you ever used

when you weren’t separating this and that? And how should a screen reader convey a “horizontal rule”?

By: Alohci

Alohci — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:22:34 +0000

@Mark

The
element is a divider between sections of text;

– HTML 2.0 Specification

Horizontal rules may be used to indicate a change in topic.

– HTML 3.2 Specification

The hr element represents a paragraph-level thematic break

– HTML 5.0 Draft Specification

I’d say that was pretty consistent really, and not a re-purposing at all. It was only HTML 4 that was out of step, in defining it (badly) only in presentational terms.

By: Mark Boughter

Mark Boughter — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:19:07 +0000

I’m not a fan of repurposing old tags.

They have created other new tags why not create instead of using “horizontal rule” to mean “not exactly a horizontal rule but maybe a separation of this and that”?

By: Oli Studholme

Oli Studholme — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 19:19:15 +0000

Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks fame has come up with a nice way of using : linear backgrounds to make a striped line.

By: Does anyone ues <hr> anymore? or do you just use border-bottom CSS properties? - Quora

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:56:39 +0000

[...] But you should use it for, as Alex Ford says, a content separator. HTML5 Doctor has a nice example: http://html5doctor.com/small-hr-…11:56amView All 0 CommentsCannot add comment at this time. Add [...]

By: Lin Crawford

Lin Crawford — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 09:41:09 +0000

I used HR a lot recently – well, over 5 years, actually. I was transcribing a 2 volume old book set, written in 1722. There were about 1200 pages. The layout of the pages was similar but somewhat inconsistent throughout the 2 volumes.
I transcribed each page as one HTML4 page. I tried to maintain a fair copy of the original look of each page, most of which began with a horizontal rule, then the page number at left, and the topic, centred. This was followed by another horizontal rule, then the text of the page.
At the end of some pages there was another horizontal rule, followed by footnotes.
Finally, at the end of every page I inserted a final horizontal rule that wasn’t in the original, followed by some info and links for more detail about the original page.
My point is that even though modern designers might not use HR, the line rule was used extensively in old printed books, and an easy method of inserting them in HTML replicas of these books is still needed.
PS: If HTML5 and a reliable CSS had been available when I started, my approach would have been different. But it’s done now, finished May 2009.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 04:14:04 +0000

I don’t recall the last time I have used or

tags…

It’s interesting that they are being used in this manner, as opposed to being removed totally… I’d like to see how this is treated by the design community. I think it’s pretty interesting.