Using the Break Element on Forms
Way back in October I recall reading Mike Cherim’s article on the proper use of the break element. In it he advocated that breaks were appropriate on forms and I decided to give that a try. To some degree I’m on the fence about whether a form is a list of fields, or an address is a list of name, address and city. Its always hard for more than two semi-associated things to not be a list – a sentence is more or less a list of words and a word is a list of letters. In a fashion. But not really. So breaks looked like an interesting way to go.
Breaks, by the way, are a markup element I’ve mostly avoided because it seems to be more used solely to put presentation into a document. Something stylesheets should be doing.
I’ve finished my little experiment with using breaks on contact forms. The result is mostly good. The markup is lighter without resorting to unordered lists or paragraphs. I do like the default rendering for text only – the form maintains its visual structure. And mostly there were no issues that bothered me with stylesheets. Except one.
I haven’t really played around that much with the stylesheets on this but it appears that an anomoly is the way it appears (with my styles at least) in Safari. That aside, if I get a chance to fix that issue I think its the way to go. Breaks do seem to be the natural solution.
