<span> (was Re: <U> Deprecated)

Jason Weigle <soilsrus@yahoo.com> writes:

> If I could just comment about something that Steven
> wrote. Be wary when using <span> to delineate sections
> to apply style to. <span> is a Netscape origninated
> tag, designed specifically for use in stylesheets and
> such.

It's also a part of the W3C HTML 4.0 standard, which has been around
for over a year and a half.  If IE doesn't properly support it yet,
isn't that a defect of their browser?  (Besides which, shouldn't a
browser be able to extract the style information from <foo
class="bar">Blah</foo> even if it doesn't understand the tag?  I would
certainly expect this from an XML-compliant browser, which I thought
IE5 was supposed to be.)

The real problem here is using <span> to replace HTML elements with
syntactic meaning, like <dfn>, <em>, <strong>, <cite>, <h1>, etc.
This is exactly the sort of thing CSS-doomsayers warn us about.

					John T. Whelan
					whelan@iname.com
					http://www.slack.net/~whelan/

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