[ZPT] Authoring tools and tag-nesting problems

[R. David Murray]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Chris Withers wrote:
> The other option, and I know this is far from perfect, would be to use CSS
> rather than things like FONT tags to do your styling. Dunno how Dreamweaver
> or GoLive fair with this though, not to mention browsers...

In the small amount of Dreamweaver HTML output I have looked at, I was
very unimpressed by its use of <font> and <b> (etc) tags.  It did not
seem to make any attempt to scope the tags to reduce redundancies and
extra tags.  Of course, part of this may be due to the brain-damaged
way these tags are handled when crossing table boundaries.  I'm
not sure if that is browser brain-damage or HTML brain-damage, but
it sure does make producing elegant HTML code harder.

Speaking of <b> tags, I presume that there is another danger here:
while Dreamweaver may leave tag attributes alone, if you
unbold that section of text it is presumably going to delete the
b tag *and its attributes*.  Meaning that using <span> to hold your
TAL code is probably almost always preferable to using a tag with
a more specific function.

--RDM