[whatwg] Tag Soup: Blocks-in-inlines

[Lachlan Hunt]

Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:09:44 +0600, Anne van Kesteren 
> <fora at annevankesteren.nl> wrote:
>> <em> has never been defined in a way that it could give entire paragraphs 
>> emphasis. I'm not really saying anything is wrong about it, just that 
>> has never been defined. Also, <em> was defined to be inline-level 
>> (nothing to do with presentation) in HTML4 which means that it could not 
>> contain block-level (again, apart from presentation) elements so parsers 
>> did funny things on error recovery.
> 
> This confirms the point that the classification of elements into 
> block-level and inline-level is just a convention not backed by a 
> semantic requirement.

The debate about the block vs. inline distinction is, unfortunately, not 
quite so simple.  It's been discussed a few times on www-html in the 
past.  I wrote a fairly good overview of the arguments in December 2003 
[1] and then the issue came up again in July 2004 [2]

[1] http://www.w3.org/mid/3FD88E7D.8060006@iinet.net.au
[2] http://www.w3.org/mid/81bb68c40407280758513a6b41@mail.gmail.com

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/