Kelly Anderson wrote:
<snip>
The basic premise of the new XHTML type standards is
that the style
sheet is king. Adding Div and Span tags with specific information in
them goes against the intent of these new standards. They support the
old stuff only for backwards compatibility (in a half sort of way).
This is not entirely true. It is perfectly legitimate and idiomatic HTML
to have a SPAN tag with style="<<<CSS>>>", especially if you
don't have
access to the style sheet (which we Wikipedia contributors don't). FONT
tags, however, are deprecated from HTML, and we should not encourage
their use. Until there are style sheets with styles for everything, the
only _correct_ way to sepcify styles is in DIV and SPAN tags.
-Kelly
I'm not entirely sure why I'm getting so much resistance. It is true
that in an ideal world, all HTML tags would be generated from the Wiki
syntax. But the Wiki syntax isn't sufficient in its current form.
Accordingly, we already allow <font> tags, they're all over the
Wikipedia, AND they're deprecated from HTML. At least <span> tags aren't
deprecated. What exactly is the problem with changing from the status
quo to the status quo plus allowing <span> tags?
- David