> What? no rules were used when you coded in assembly? There are always rules in everything. In assembler they're predictable and absolute though. With html a lot of things are only 'hints' and it invisibly does whatever it wants without telling you what happened. Add to that different browsers do it differently. I'd rate html as harder personally. Understanding what a single instruction of assembler does is trivial.
> > it is very easy to validate against an (X)HTML dtd. If you do so, you > will save yourself a lot of headaches and have your pages display / > most/ similar across browser. Pick a DTD (xhtml strict is nice...) and > validate against it. In this case a strict xhtml doctype made no difference in the behaviour of the jquery. I didn't expect it would but I checked anyway. My reading of the xhtml standard seemed to indicate including javascript snippets while doing dynamic page construction was outside the standards. The browsers do it any way since it's the only reasonable way to accomplish some tasks. The browsers don't all behave within the standards or even in a common way. Standards are great. Everyone should have several. ;) http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.4 I haven't had time to do an exhausitve search but nowhere in the span tag description does it specifically state what tags it may or may not enclose. Care to share a link to what you use for xhtml validation?
