Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:09:44 +0600, Anne van Kesteren
<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.
Of course it can be. What does:
<abbr>
<ul/>
<p/>
</abbr>
mean? How can a paragraph and a list be abbreviations for anything?
Similarly how would <dfn><header/></dfn> work? How can a header be the
defining instance of a term when a header is clearly not a term?.
Clearly there is a useful distinction to be made between elements that
apply to textual content and elements that provide page structure. This,
essentially, is the semantic requirement behind the block/inline
distinction.
--
"It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people
believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly
that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise."
-- http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
