- From: Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com>
- Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 17:31:13 -0700
- To: "Jonathan Chetwynd" <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>
- Cc: <www-style@w3.org>
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Chetwynd" <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com> | "This is why anchors and hyperlinks are inline only - they attached | to words - the only known positioned entities." | | Andrew, | | What about images? or block level elements, which can't be contained | in inline elements? | Again, we are speaking here about pure HTML. Imagine that there no CSS at all in the Universe. >From HTML point of view images are special type of characters (or single character words) - they positioned inline as other text (floating images is an exception) . There are only two types of "blocks" from HTML point of view - document itself and table cell. All other tags (not elements, sic!) has no visiual indication that they are blocks (no borders/backgrounds) - thus some hypethetical renderer can forget about DIVs, BLOCKQUOTEs, etc immediately after parsing. Parsing/layouting here is a simple incremental process - build list of tagged (by hyperlinks) words and their postions by using markup rules. To render just walk through all of words and draw them at their positions. Plain HTML renderer is significantly simpler than HTML/CSS renderer - it does not require DOM - just list of words. Or it is "flat DOM" if you wish. I guess that this simplicity was deliberate intention of HTML inventors. Andrew Fedoniouk. http://terrainformatica.com
Received on Friday, 7 October 2005 00:31:19 UTC