[paulddraper]

Putting yourself in the driver's seat decades ago, how should these render? What content should the browser put on the clipboard? How should text selection work?

    <s>See</s> <s>Spot</s> <s>run.</s>
    <s>See</s> Spot <s>run.</s>

Given that HTML is a text markup language, it made sense for text (including whitespace) to be significant, and the SGML to be minimally disruptive. 10% tags 90% text.

Now, in 2018 we want to develop applications not documents, and our HTML is now 90% tags 10% text.

In retrospect, inline should do what inline-block does now. And flexbox should have been used instead of many table/inline-block/float hacks. CSS is a mess: 20/100 foresight and 20/20 hindsight.