[specialist]

> 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.