About Miscellaneous HTML tags...
= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson [bloo@blooberry.com] =

Justification For the Miscellaneous HTML Tag category

In classifying all of the HTML tags into categories, there are bound to be some tags that defy classification in the established conventional categories. Some of these tags have characteristics that could easily place them in several of the tag categories, while others exhibit traits not found in any of the categories. I will try to describe my decision for to place each of these tags here.

BASEFONT

Basefont is somewhat of an anomaly. It is used to define the behavior of relative changes within the FONT tag as well as the default text size for blocks of text in some browsers. As such it behaves as neither a true inline character formatting element or a block formatting element.

SPACER

The new SPACER tag is a Netscape-ism that really has no place in the document structure. Judging by behavior and structure, this tag most closely resembles the IMG tag, but its only purpose is to act as an empty screen formatting element - contrary to the original intent of HTML.

HR

The horizontal rule tag is another orphan. It produces a somewhat graphical effect (Multimedia), inserts a linebreak before and after (Block Formatting) and has a semantic structural document purpose (Character and Block formatting.)

NOLAYER

The LAYER / ILAYER tags have ben placed under the block and character formatting categories respectively, even though they do not strictly exhibit qualities necessary for those categories. I may soon move them to their own category. Part of the reason for this is the NOLAYER tag. It is only used when non-conforming browsers try to render layered pages that include these tags using the SRC attribute. In such a case, older browsers will not be able to access the sub-document, so this tag becomes a necessary fallback.

COMMENT and <!-- -->

The true SGML comment (<!-- -->) and to some extent the HTML <COMMENT> act outside the boundaries of normal HTML behavior. Comments can be used anywhere within an HTML document structure and were arbitrarily put into this section for...safe-keeping? =)

Official References

ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1866.txt

RFC 1866: The HTML 2.0 specification (plain text)

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec

The web version of the HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) specification

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Wilbur/

The HTML 3.2 (Wilbur) proposal
[Includes all HTML 2 elements and newer extensions to the HR tag]

http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/html_extensions.html

Netscape Extensions to HTML 2.0
[Usage of BASEFONT for the SIZE attribute, extensions to the HR tag, and HTML comments as well]

http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/3.0/relnotes/windows-3.0.html#Layout

Netscape 3.0 release notes
[Details the use of the SPACER tag]

http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/newhtml/htmlr020.htm

Internet Explorer 3.0 Tag reference
[Details BASEFONT usage for Color, Face and Size, as well as HR extensions]

Other Related Links

http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/sfk/table/spacers.html

[Very interesting use of HRs and tables to produce simple graphics patterns]