div & span support

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Richard Taytor <dick at gutz.com> [2007-03-05 00:05]:

> Whatever characters one chooses to use (I imagine some

> resistance to ~), I think div and span support is essential.


I don’t know about <div>, but <span> is an inline element so you
can just type it literally. Markdown doesn’t have to have support
for *every* HTML tag – that will just lead to unreadable line
noise as you end up with lots of funny squiggles with some kind
of meaning that you have no chance at all of guessing.

I’d also say that if you need <span> tags so much that writing
them literally doesn’t cut it, then you’re writing a lot of
semantically meaningless markup; which means *something* is
wrong. (I almost never use <span>; usually it’s <b>, sometimes
<i>, and I undo the default bold/italic style as necessary in the
stylesheet. These tags are just as meaningless as <span>, but at
least they do have a default presentation, so if the stylesheet
is not in effect, there’s still an indication that I wanted to
convey *something*. As a bonus, they’re easier to type and, if
relevant, also easier on the filesize.)

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>