Redefining span this way makes about as much sense as redefining (just to get a little perl into this) print to mean foreach.
<span> has a legitimate use -- to make a part of a markup element different from the rest. For example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http:/
+/www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
span {
color: red;
}
blockquote{
margin-left: 6em;
margin-right: 8em;
font-style: italic
}
.red {
color: red;
background-color:transparent;
}
.b {
font-weight: bold;
color: green;
background-color:#dddddd;
}
.black {
color: black;
background-color: #aaaaff;
width: 8em;
max-width:8em;
text-align:center;
}
foobar {
color: blue;
background-color: transparent;
font-size: 1.8em;
font-style: italic;
}
.foobar {
color: blue;
background-color: red;
font-size: 1.8em;
font-style: italic;
}
</style>
<title>My title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><span>this should be red... and it is, because browsers will genera
+lly allow this abuse.</span> But a decent validator (CSS specific or
+html/css) will tell you something like this:</p>
<blockquote>The "span" tag has no attributes. Attributes are
+ normally used with the "span" element to provide functiona
+lity.</blockquote>
<p>Normal text. <span>red text</span> and back to normal.</p>
<p><span class="b">And this bold, green and with a grey background.</s
+pan></p>
<p class="black">Black</p>
<p class="span">Red? Not today! <foobar> ...because span is NOT a clas
+s.</foobar> However, turning again to our validator:</p>
<blockquote>The "foobar" is not a recognized element in this
+ selector. Is it misspelled?</blockquote>
<p>Well, no, but while it works, there's no guarantee that it will tom
+orrow ... or even today, in some browsers.</p>
<p>dot_foobar (or even id foobar) would be a valid selector... used li
+ke this: <span class="foobar">text rendered as spec'ed by dot_foobar<
+/span></p>
</body>
</html>
So if you're going to give advice on css, please do so with good advice; that is, with a decent respect for standards. | 