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[Discussion] Why isn't there a horizontal rule?

Omar Polo op at omarpolo.com

Thu Sep 23 09:22:49 BST 2021

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Draco Metallium(Rodrigo S. CaƱibano) <draco.kun at gmail.com> writes:

Hi!
I was going to send a long and passionate defence for the inclusion of
the horizontal rule (or "The Thematic Break" according to mozilla web
docs) when a line started with three hyphens. But on the last
paragraph I just realize I had to check the mailing list archive
before, and it turns out it had been already proposed, and not only
that, but I can't find a counter argument:
=
https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/000375.html
I'm wondering now: why wasn't it accepted? Was it just forgotten?
Thanks for your time!
---
Draco Metallium

I can agree that having a horizontal rule would be nice. On thegeminispace there are pages that uses either

----

or

``` --- ```

which I personally dislike.

Some time ago I experimented with this a little. Theproposal/break-page branch of telescope has some code which renders ^L(form feed, used to separate "pages") with a nice separator. (I wentwith ^L to avoid false positive with lines starting with `---' orsimilar)

But then I left that branch rotting. I guess that part of the reasonsomething like this wasn't included before is because of the saying"perfection is when you can't remove anything" (or something similar,but the gist is that.) Horizontal rule can be avoided by properly usingparagraphs and headings in most cases.

Cheers,

Omar Polo