About Miscellaneous HTML Elements...
= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson [bloo@blooberry.com] =

Justification For the Miscellaneous HTML Element category

In classifying all of the HTML elements into categories, there were bound to be some elements that defied classification in the established conventional categories. Some of these elements have characteristics that could easily place them in several of the element categories, while others exhibit traits not found in any of the categories. I will try to describe my decision for placing each of these elements here.

BASEFONT

Basefont is somewhat of an anomaly. It is used to define the behavior of relative changes within the FONT element as well as the default text size for blocks of text in some browsers. As such it behaves as neither a true inline character formatting element or a block formatting element. Hindsight causes one to wonder if the behavior this element was meant to control would have been better suited to a BODY element attribute or a HEAD element.

BDO

BDO is a new element that is aimed specifically at addressing language flow directionality issues in HTML documents. It can not be easily grouped with other element behaviors.

HR

The horizontal rule element is another orphan. It is a replaced element that produces a somewhat graphical effect (Multimedia), inserts a linebreak before and after (Block Formatting) and has a semantic structural document purpose (Character and Block formatting.)

SPACER

The SPACER element is a Netscape-ism that really has no place in the document structure. Judging by behavior and structure, this element most closely resembles the IMG element, but its only purpose is to act as an empty screen formatting element - contrary to the original intent of HTML.

XML

This element produces an island of XML content within an HTML document. As such, its content isn't actually HTML, so is difficult to classify.

COMMENT and <!-- -->

The true SGML comment (<!-- -->) and to some extent the HTML <COMMENT> act outside the boundaries of normal HTML behavior. Comments can be used anywhere within an HTML document structure and were arbitrarily put into this section for...safe-keeping? =)

Related Sites

Official References

http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1866.txt

RFC 1866: The HTML 2.0 specification (plain text)

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec

The web version of the HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) specification

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Wilbur/

The HTML 3.2 (Wilbur) recommendation
[Includes all HTML 2 elements and newer extensions to the HR element]

http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/html_extensions.html

Netscape Extensions to HTML 2.0
[Usage of BASEFONT for the SIZE attribute, extensions to the HR element, and HTML comments as well]

http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/3.0/relnotes/windows-3.0.html#Layout

Netscape 3.0 release notes
[Details the use of the SPACER element]

http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/html/reference/elements.htm

Internet Explorer 4.0 Tag reference
[Details BASEFONT usage for Color, Face and Size, as well as HR extensions]

http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects/XML.asp

Internet Explorer 5.0 Tag reference
[Details XML element usage]

Other Related Links

http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/sfk/table/spacers.html

[Very interesting use of HRs and tables to produce simple graphics patterns]