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

----- Original Message -----
From: John Whelan <whelan@itp.unibe.ch>
To: <www-style@w3.org>
Cc: <Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl>; <davids@nwi.net>; <soilsrus@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 1999 1:05 PM
Subject: <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?

If the text was being processed as XML, then possibly. If it were being
processed as SGML, then a DTD would be required. But I don't think current
browsers process HTML as either.

>  I would
> certainly expect this from an XML-compliant browser, which I thought
> IE5 was supposed to be.)

HTML 4 is an SGML application, not an XML application. I don't think XML
conformance has anything to do with the handling of this situation.

Braden N. McDaniel
braden@endoframe.com
<URI:http://www.endoframe.com>

Received on Wednesday, 21 July 1999 20:23:09 UTC