Peter Flynn <peter.nosp@m...> wrote in
<5h9ii4F3j74kmU1@m...>:
> Pavel Lepin wrote:
>> Mike <raathm@g...> wrote in
>> <1185879569.684575.166940@1...>:
>>> <div>
>>>     Some text
>>>     <span>blah blah</span>
>>>     Some more text
>>> </div>
>>>
>>> How is this represented in a DOM? The <span> should be a
>>> child element - are the "Some text" and "Some more text"
>>> sibling elements,
>> 
>> Sibling nodes of 'span' element, not sibling elements.
>> And child nodes of 'div' element.
> 
> And in general, don't do this at the div level. It'll make
> your teeth fall out, give you white hair, and end in tears
> and recriminations. Where possible, use better markup:
> 
> <div>
>      <p>Some text
>      <span>blah blah</span>
>      Some more text</p>
> </div>
> 
> Dangling mixed content (what you described) needs to be
> avoided.

Pardon my bluntness, but to me that looks silly and
superfluous; and it doesn't get rid of "dangling" text
nodes even if getting rid of them in document markup was a
good idea. Stuffing a p into a div looks weird--why would
you need a div then? It's just a block element with no
additional semantics. If you want a paragraph, use a p.

The entire "one text node per element" idea just doesn't
make much sense (in context of document markup, as opposed
to data markup), unless for some inexplicable reason you
want to stuff everything with default semantics into a
span; and that doesn't even work, because of the way
whitespace is handled in XHTML, and because of Gecko's
peculiar idiosyncrasies where long text nodes in DOM are
concerned. 

-- 
...the pleasure of obedience is pretty thin compared with
the pleasure of hearing a rotten tomato hit someone in the
rear end. -- Garrison Keillor