Tony wrote:
Subject says it all.
Currently (MediaWiki 1.3 beta 3) DIV is an allowed HTML tag, but SPAN is not allowed.
I don't like either SPAN or DIV myself. It makes editing Wikipedia
articles look too much like editing HTML. I'm more HTML-literate than a
lot of Wikipedia editors, and I usually read anything with a div in it
as "blah blah formatting crap" and skip past it. Granted, some of the
same holds true for tables, even in wiki-syntax, but that's probably
unavoidable without an wysiwyg table editor. But I think we could at
least limit the non-humanly-transparent stuff in the source; the move
from divs for floating images to using the extended image syntax is a
huge step in the right direction.
I think there could be a use for semantic classes that are easily
readable--along the lines of <math> we could have <anythingelse>, but I
think the syntax for that has already been proposed and discussed at
length (anyone have a pointer to that discussion?). I suppose span
could do that as well if kept to a simple class-based usage like the
<span class=reptile> you proposed, but the word "span" isn't really
intuitive to anyone who doesn't know HTML, and I don't see why that
would be preferable to <reptile>blah</reptile>, which is readable by
just about everyone (if indeed "reptile" were a sematic markup tag we
thought useful).
-Mark