Hi Patrick,

On experimenting with it it also appears that address is an inline element so fails to validate if you put e.g. a <dl> inside it.

From the XHTML 1.0 Transistional DTD:

<!-- information on author -->

<!ELEMENT address (#PCDATA | %inline; | %misc.inline; | p)*>
<!ATTLIST address
  %attrs;
  >

So while it may seem logical to give the internals some structure like...

<address>
   <dl>
      <dt>Contact Person</dt>
      <dd>Rod Someone</dd>
      <dt>Email</dt>
      <dd>[EMAIL PROTECTED]</dd>
   </dl>
</address>

...it just won't allow it. So, unless I'm missing something, <address> seems fairly worthless and doesn't appear set to get any better in future specs. It's intended use "for a document or a major part of a document" also seems to cross over where metadata would probably be more appropriate.

Thanks,

Nick

Address is another half-baked, not completely thought out element, in my opinion. It's fluffy and lacks consistent internal structure definition to be truly useful - so some people just use lots of line breaks (and, it could be argued, in this context <br /> is actually semantic, as the explicit break can be seen as an essential part of the address itself, rather than simply a presentational feature). At the same time, its definition is extremely limited in that it must, according to spec, refer to the current document or section.
In your specific case, I'd say the use of address is right, as you're providing contact information for the particular section, which talks about the Tasmania branch. Effectively, I wouldn't worry too much about how *exactly* the semantics of address are being followed...once again, it's a badly thought out element, whose definition is both too vague in its structure and too overly specific in its intended application. If you use it, go ahead as per your example...but I would actually question its usefulness. (ok, I *can* imagine some kind of semantic spider collecting meta information on web pages on the fly and looking for addresses on each page to associate with the current document...but I doubt this would be feasible, as there's no way to associate an address explicitly with only a section of a document - unless you go by its container / parent)

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