Some days ago I had a short discussion with a colleague about a display bug in (surprise) IE. The solution he found was to replace all tags (except html, head, body I guess) with <span> and style the layout with CSS. He really means it, and he was proud that he has found a solution to all(!) display problems in IE.
Michael,
If I had to replace all the meaningful tags with a single meaningless tag, I'd choose <div> before <span> just because it's by default a block element and most of my page layout structures are blocks. Theoretically this might not matter because one can change block to inline and inline to block in CSS, but scary creaks from the attic of my memory tell me that such transformations don't occur the same cross-browser. (Does anything?) Besides, in the absence of CSS an all-span page would turn into a solid unbroken block of words whereas an all-div page in most user agents would at least be a series of separated text blocks.
Yes, reducing down to a single tag for all structures would probably reduce your screen-painting headaches but it wouldn't eliminate them, because, for example, different browsers use different rules in rendering the box model. Of all the problems that people bring to CSS-D, I think the vast majority pertain to blocks. If you forsake all tags but one you'd gain only about an inch of ground.
And lose a mile. If a web page were merely a palette of light perhaps it wouldn't matter what structure underlay the various shapes we see (and hear). But a web page is a structure of meaning. Rendering a page in a particular graphic layout is only one layer of the cake. The more meaning that can be derived from a page, the more function can result from its interaction with user agents, spiders, and other page-reading entities. Perhaps if your colleague could listen to a tag-less page with a screen reader he would be appalled by his own suggestion.
Good luck,
Paul
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
