Re: lynx-dev <BR> does not accumulate

[Philip Webb]

980812 Al Gilman wrote: 
> to follow up on what Philip Webb said:
>> Lynx collapses multiple  <br>  tags into  1  for some reason,
>> which no-one has ever explained to my satisfaction:...
> From the HTML 4 specification: Paragraphs, Lines, and Phrases
>> The BR element forcibly breaks (ends) the current line of text.
>> 
>> For visual user agents, the clear attribute can be used to determine
>> whether markup following the BR element flows around images
>> & other objects floated to the left or right margin,
>> or whether it starts after the bottom of such objects ...
>> 
>> With respect to bidirectional formatting, the BR element should behave
>> the same way the [ISO10646] LINE SEPARATOR character behaves
>> in the bidirectional algorithm.
> <BR> is a directive which says:
> "the text after <BR> should be on a line after the text before <BR>.
> It ends the current line, it does not introduce a new line.
> Hence <BR><BR> has the same effect as <BR>.
> Lynx didn't 'collapse' them, it honored each and every one.
> The <BR> following the <BR> is not text, it does not appear on a line.
> The following _text_ appears after a new line starts.
 
i love these! they take me back to Seattle, doing graduate philosophy:
Aristotle -- a friend of mine after  2 yrs  dissertation --
would have written a whole chapter (or more) on this!

anyway, when you end one line in the middle of a text,
you must thereby start the next line
(only if it were the end of the text, would that not be the case);
therefore, the 2nd <BR> already lies on a new line as soon as it appears
& thus ends that 2nd line, thereby starting another -- 3rd -- line.

that's what the Philosopher would say, i'm sure,
but also back in the 1960s i used to get my real highs doing set theory:
when it was first proposed the empty set met with some opposition,
but in axiomatic set theory it is the only set
whose existence can be established without a supporting axiom;
clearly, the 2nd line in our hypothetical HTML is the empty text,
which is a real enough piece of text, delineated by the  2  <BR>'s.

"<BR> ends the current line of text" : that's ALL we are told,
but it is enough to draw the inferences above;
we are nowhere told that  2  <BR>'s have the same meaning as  1 ,
which we surely would be told if that had been the intention.

"Lynx didn't 'collapse' them" : that's the very word used in  lynx.cfg !
moreover, collapsing <BR>'s was not part of Lynx till 2-7,
when some anonymous developer slipped it into the code without warning.

so i agree with the gentleman in Vancouver that it's a bug,
at least in the sense that Lynx 2-8 doesn't comply with HTML 4.0.

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