On Fri, 18 May 2012, Gerrit Brüning wrote:
>> horizontal rules, pointing hands in margins, and such like textual
>> things which break up a text in some way.
> Horizontal rules, too? In TEI Tite one would certainly use <ornament>. And 
> when I asked for the canonical equivalent of <ornament> I learned that 
> <ornament> is converted to <figure> 
> (http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=TEI-L;UC7zOw;20120314171551%2B0000). 
> So where does the common use of <milestone> comes from? It seems abusive to 
> me.

I don't know how common it is now, but the use of <milestone/> to
capture vaguely division-marking horizontal rules was so common
amongst the practitioners of TEI-lite 15-20 years ago that our
default rendering of <milestone/> was HTML <hr>. I believe that
the use arose from the definition of <milestone>: "marks the boundary
between sections of a text". When such a boundary was indicated
in the source by means of a horizontal rule, then it was captured
as a <MILESTONE REND="hr"> or some such--normally only when the
sections so marked were vague enough that we were not attempting
to place them in <DIV>s.

pfs
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