Re: [OT] anchor as block level element

This is off topic.  It would belong on www-html.  However, as that
list is about futures and XHTML 2 allows links on practically
any element, it would not last long there.

> Technically speaking pure HTML does not require existence of DOM
> in the way it is defined here: http://www.w3.org/DOM/ .

Pure HTML still has an infoset and that infoset represents a strict
and well defined tree.  It is that that CSS works on, not some
object oriented language structure.  (DOM gets the name document
object model because of the methods and attributes, not because
of its basic tree-like nature.)

> To render pure HTML there is no need for DOM. You can simply
> parse HTML and layout words and images on the screen - direct
> interpretation.

Attempts to treat it as isolated tags resulted in tag soup parsing
(tag soup is invalid HTML) and often resulted in invalid rendering
of more complicated cases.  It encouraged people to write invalid
HTML.

> As you may know  also "block element"  term is different in HTML and CSS.
> Block in HTML is an element require ending tag and in CSS it describes the

Actually, most if not all the elements for which the closing tag can be
inferred are block level, the opposite of what you just wrote.  However,
that is not the meaning of block level in HTML.  HTML is about establishing
a two level hierarchy that allows some constraints to be put onto 
document structures, and has the presumption that rendering equivalent
to CSS block and inline rendering will be performed.

> way of how element of the DOM will be rendered.
> 
> To be short: DOM is a child of scripting and CSS.

The tree structure of HTML is a consequence of SGML and was there
from the beginning.

Received on Thursday, 6 October 2005 21:58:39 UTC