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PTG Interview

Tuesday 25 May, 2004 ( 9:53AM GMT)

Over at The Web Standards Group, you'll find 10 Questions for Patrick Griffiths.

If you want to take me up on anything, you can go for it here (although the hr thing's already an argument going on elsewhere).

Comments

Comment 1

Heh. It's good to put a face to a voice.

So said Chris on Tuesday 25 May, 2004 at 12:25PM GMT.

Comment 2

What's with the beard? No offense, but you look like a hippy :)

Are you a hippy? If so you should be over here in San Francisco.

"hr could be used to show a horizontal rule. It is unusual to use hr in a CSS designed page anyway; properties such as border-top and border-bottom or even just plain old images do the job much better."

Why do you contradict yourself? I'm certainly not going to increase download time by using images when a current (X)HTML tag does the same thing.

So said Dante on Wednesday 26 May, 2004 at 1:12AM GMT.

Comment 3

I'm not sure where the contradiction is...

And you don't *have* to use an image - that's just an option. The 'horizontal rules' that separate these comments, for example, are made with borders.

So said Patrick on Wednesday 26 May, 2004 at 9:23AM GMT.

Comment 4

Patrick, looks as though you just adopted yourself a little troll ;)
hahaha

Cheers,
D

So said Deselect on Wednesday 26 May, 2004 at 9:07PM GMT.

Comment 5

I generally do something like:

</div>
<hr class="hide">
<div>

and just style the hr out, and style a div border in. Then, if the user is not using CSS, the hr will serve as a separator.

So said Neal on Saturday 29 May, 2004 at 8:06AM GMT.

Comment 6

It's contradicting because he says to always use semantically correct tags. HR is more semantically correct than IMG, or using   and giving the P a border bottom (although for comments that's a good idea). For my history website redesign I still use HRs to seperate articles, because:
1. Who wants to waste time downloading images?
2. They are semantically correct (and to appease you I used no B or I tags).

Deselect, I'm trying not to yell you at you. This is why I considered quitting web development: every time I make an argument I am considered a troll.

So said Dante on Sunday 30 May, 2004 at 7:35PM GMT.

Comment 7

@Dante: I too think that the <hr /> tag is more correct than border-bottom or an img tag, but as Patrick said it should rather be called <divider /> or <seperator /> or so, because "horizontal ruler" is refering to the presentation of the seperator, which should imho only be determined by CSS.

So said Maximilian Baumgart on Monday 31 May, 2004 at 1:58PM GMT.

Comment 8

But we must remember that CSS is optional. Your page must be usable without it.

It's considered good practice to indicate height and width in img elements - presentational information - because it allows the browser to render the page knowing the space which the image requires. If we remove this from the HTML and include it only in the CSS, non-CSS users will see a page leap around.

If I create a data table, it is rendered with no rules by default in perhaps all browsers. This can make the table less usable when CSS is not used. Therefore, setting the border attribute on table is recommended, even though this is also presentational information.

When we rely on CSS to render the page in distinct sections, non-CSS renderings will not reflect that, and this can lead to confusion by the user. An example is the "Note:" boxes used, for example, on this site. How does the user know when the note is finished and the main content continues? For usability we need to set it off somehow, and hr is the best option for this.

Therefore, I don't advocate complete unprejudiced separation of presentation from content neatly into CSS and HTML By putting all style in the CSS and none in the HTML, some functionality of the page may occur when rendered without CSS. I advocate adding only those presentational aspects to the HTML as are necessary for the CSS-less HTML to be optimally usable - and all the "disposable" rendering suggestions should be put in the CSS.

So said Neal on Monday 31 May, 2004 at 10:20PM GMT.

Comment 9

Max, that is true, but until W3C actually approves of such a tag and browsers support it I will continue to use HR.

So said Dante on Thursday 3 June, 2004 at 1:23AM GMT.

Comment 10

And what the hell does the T stand for?
If you can be PTG I can be DRE (Dante Reginald Evans), but I believe someone else has that name.

So said Dante on Thursday 3 June, 2004 at 1:40AM GMT.

Comment 11

The concept of elastic design is an interesting one - I tend to find that most sites that have a few images on and are elastic look appalling when the text is either very large or very small.

Certainly there's a need to help accessibility, but font size is arguably not the first place to start. I'd start by dropping white backgrounds - if you think about it, especially in low lighting conditions, it's like staring at the sun.

Black text on white backgrounds is an eye killer, and it's been shown that black on lightly coloured backgrounds help those with special needs, and things like dyslexia.

So said Neil on Wednesday 23 June, 2004 at 4:58PM GMT.

Comment 12

I generally do something like:


OR

OR

and just style the hr out, and style a div border in.

So said google163 on Saturday 9 October, 2004 at 5:24PM GMT.

Comment 13

OH,my god!
I generally do something like:


OR

OR

and just style the hr out, and style a div border in.
In use,please use hr instead of hr1,div instead of div1

So said google163 on Saturday 9 October, 2004 at 5:30PM GMT.

Comment 14

Please delete the message i posted above,in oder to hide the hr of other thing,we can use CSS as following: style="position:absolute;visibility: hidden;"

So said google163 on Saturday 9 October, 2004 at 5:33PM GMT.

Comment 15

I absolutely agree with PTG that HR does work. I tried it myself many times and now I’ll never come back to the old ways.

So said Serge, designer on Monday 29 November, 2004 at 3:49PM GMT.

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