Horizontal Rule: Good or Bad design decision [closed]

Question

I have a custom control I built that contains a list of items to be selected. I was concerned that these items would run together seeing as how there can be many different types of actions in this list.

• Create
• Edit
• View

So I made the ability to separate these into groups by using a horizontal rule.

Someone I work with thinks that horizontal rules are a terrible design choice, and wants me to change it to a stylized DIV. I do not really have an opinion other than they are simple to implement. The HR I implemented is styled nicely and looks good.

Thoughts? Are horizontal rules a good or bad design choice?

Answer 1

Bad, and so is using a div simply for adding a horizontal div. Instead, consider putting the line which looks like horizontal rule as a border to the element you want to divide. This will be semantically correct as you are not affecting the structure of the HTML document you are creating.

This article goes in to depth about how div's can be abused by using them as presentation elements only. While sometimes there is no avoiding it, this is not one of those times.