Re: anchor as block level element

----- 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 00:33:15 UTC