Stupid

Nir pointed out to me that there is a line in the spec which says:

Each MAP element may contain either one of the following:
1.One or more AREA elements...
2.Block-level content...

Which means that the two things are not allowed in there together. Since 
the whole thing is getting unwieldy anyway it seems that for the present 
we have Imagemaps, and we use the HTML 4.0 MAP element as a structural 
division within which we can put navigation bars and similar collections 
of links. Although I can't see why there is that requirement - it takes 
some flexibility away that may be very useful. (Although I can't think of 
anything except solving the legacy problem that it is useful for.)

On the other hand, I can't see where in the spec it says that MAP is an 
inline. In the discussion (7.5.3 Block-level and Inline elements, 
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-HTML40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.3) it says that 
Inline elements generally cannot contain block elements, which MAP 
specifically can. By my reading that means MAP is likely to be a block 
element, and in any case it seems to me that it is permissible for inline 
elements to be children of BODY (Although unusual. And my understanding 
was that in practice any inline stuff which was a child of BODY was given 
a P as its parent.) But I have just crashed my browser, so I have stopped 
checking this.


(And actually I am not unhappy about the idea of using MAPs with 
block-level content and waiting for UAs to catch up. But I guess it would 
be hard selling it to authors.)

Charles McCathieNevile

Received on Monday, 16 November 1998 23:37:43 UTC