Question

I’m new to HTML, but have a long history with XML. It strikes me as odd that an HTML style element looks like this.

<style type="text/css">
    .style1 { width: 250px; }
    .style2 { width: 20px; }
</style>

I would have thought the same information could have been captured in a more XML friendly format. For example maybe this

<style type="text/css">
    <style1 width="250px"/>
    <style2 width="25px"/>
</style>

It seems to me that the latter would be parsed by the XML parser, whereas the former would require custom parsing code. It seems so uncharacteristic that I am wondering if there is actually a good reason.

Thanks,

Michael

Answer 1

Mainly because it predates XML. See section 7.2.3.3 of Håkon Wium Lie’s thesis:
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/#h-275