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

[Omar Polo]

Draco Metallium(Rodrigo S. Cañibano) <draco.kun@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://mailing-list-archive.gemi.dev/www/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 the
geminispace there are pages that uses either

  ----

or

  ```
  ---
  ```

which I personally dislike.

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

But then I left that branch rotting.  I guess that part of the reason
something 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 using
paragraphs and headings in most cases.

Cheers,

Omar Polo