[Doc-SIG] Representation of Horizontal Rules

[David Goodger]

> David Goodger wrote:
>> I'm leaning towards solution #2.

Tony J Ibbs (Tibs) wrote:
> However, personally I would lean strongly to option 3.

If I squint my left eye, I can see both sides of the argument. Once again,
it's a matter of perception. Take a look at a novel or short story, and
locate the "transitions", extra vertical whitespace or a line of three
well-spaced asterisks. Is this construct merely the border between two
segments of text, or is it an object in its own right, a vertical elipsis?

I tried to find a DTD containing such a construct in either sense, to
establish precedent. Neither DocBook nor TEI contain such a beast. Does
anybody know of a publicly-available DTD suitable for the markup of typical
prose, such as a novel?

[Tony, re option 2]
> There's an advantage in this for me, in fact. I want to be able to
> indicate that a paragraph *after* a title is special (specifically, when
> doing the title for package, module and class sections). Being able to
> enclose such a paragraph (or paragraphs) within a division [1]_ makes it
> *much* easier to do what I want, and without having to add any new
> classes to the DPS node tree. So although I may object (slightly) to the
> proposal on the grounds David wants it, I do like the idea for subtly
> different reasons.

Is this misguided embrace of option 2 really just an attempt to force me to
choose option 3, in order to foil such a blatant abuse of markup? Tricky!
But you can't fool me. I'm on to you...

-- 
David Goodger    goodger@users.sourceforge.net    Open-source projects:
 - Python Docstring Processing System: http://docstring.sourceforge.net
 - reStructuredText: http://structuredtext.sourceforge.net
 - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net