and of course he ought really prefix his sig text with an hr tag in any case.

But why should I? There's a perlmonks template for signature, which includes two tags that makes it easy to write CSS for it.

With that I consider my responsibility done in marking my signature as such, and the default CSS should just do something with it.

If the general consensus is that there should be horizontal line before the signature, one can always say

.pmsig { border-top: 3px solid gray }
[download]

or something along these lines. And yes, IMHO that should be in the default CSS.

That's what proper HTML markup and associated CSS is for: give the designer a choice to make the pages look as she wants them to. I'm not a designer, so I will gladly cede this decision to somebody with more aesthetic perception.

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

Signatures are now delineated from the main post by a thin, CSS generated line. The other themes may change that. If a <HR> element is the first element in a signature, that HR gets hidden via CSS. That way, old signatures look mostly the same as new signatures, even if they already used a <HR> to delineate themselves from the content.

Without verifying, I suspect there are many tags added to PM posts that are not addressed by the default CSS. But I think there is another issue in play:

How much do we want to incentivize Anonymous Monk (vs. registered users)?

Personally, I think it is worthwhile to gently discourage Anonymous Monk, or, rather, encourage him to register.

HTH,

planetscape