> The spec editor just made them up on a whim... I met the guy on the IE team who created the <span> element. He just had the notion, coded it up over a weeken

> The spec editor just made them up on a whim... I met the guy on the IE team who created the <span> element. He just had the notion, coded it up over a weekend, merged, and then shipped. Yes, <span> was useful and needed. Bravo. And yet, I was so grumpy that he and the whole IE team treated this stuff so casually, so ad hoc. This was back when I still cared about standards, correctness, interop, compatibility, following the rules. It was a phase. I'm over it. I've accepted that programming is now archeology, forensics, and scrapping.