The (age old) horizontal rule element

The specification

For being one of the OG's of HTML (Firefox has had support for it since it first launched 🤯), there's really not much to it. The whole thing is described in one (convoluted) sentence:

The hr element represents a paragraph-level thematic break, e.g., a scene change in a story, or a transition to another topic within a section of a reference book; alternatively, it represents a separator between a set of options of a select element.

I love the ...or a separator between a set of options of a select element. It feels so right and so wrong at the same time.

Example

The following paragraph is an excerpt from Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton taken from the HTML spec for the horizontal rule element:

Dudley was ninety-two, in his second life, and fast approaching time for another rejuvenation. Despite his body having the physical age of a standard fifty-year-old, the prospect of a long degrading campaign within academia was one he regarded with dread. For a supposedly advanced civilization, the Intersolar Commonwealth could be appallingly backward at times, not to mention cruel.

Maybe it won't be that bad he told himself. The lie was comforting enough to get him through the rest of the night's shift

The Carlton AllLander drove Dudley home just after dawn. Like the astronomer, the vehicle was old and worn, but perfectly capable of doing its job. It had a cheap diesel engine, common enough on a semi-frontier world like Gralmond, although its drive array was a thoroughly modern photoneural processor. With its high suspension and deep-tread tyres it could plough along the dirt track to the observatory in all weather and seasons, including the metre-deep snow of Gralmond's winters.