nesting divs & spans

[AlanHK]

I was looking at an epub converted by Calibre.
Cleaning it up I ran epubcheck and found it warning on numerous lines:

ERROR(RSC-005): Error while parsing file 'element "div" not allowed here; expected the element end-tag, text or element "a", "abbr", "acronym", "applet", "b", "bdo", "big", "br", "cite", "code", "del", "dfn", "em", "i", "iframe", "img", "ins", "kbd", "map", "noscript", "ns:svg", "object", "q", "samp", "script", "small", "span", "strong", "sub", "sup", "tt" or "var" (with xmlns:ns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg")

That's the "<div class="calibre11">" line below.

Obviously this is awful spaghetti code, but I thought it was at least valid.

<div class="calibre14">
    <span class="calibre15"> 

    <div class="calibre11">
      <span class="calibre9">ABC<br class="calibre11"/> </span>
    </div>

 DEF 

    </span>
  </div>

Is it invalid to have a div within a span? Sigil's "well formed"check is OK, all readers are OK.

[Doitsu]

<div> is a block-level element that can contain pretty much any other element. OTOH, <span> is an inline element that can contain only other inline elements.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

Is it invalid to have a div within a span?

Yes. You can have a <span> within a <div>, but not vice versa.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

Sigil's "well formed"check is OK, all readers are OK.

Always remember that Sigil's Well Formed check is not a specification checker/validator. It merely checks to see if all open tags are closed and that there are no nesting errors (meaning improper overlap of tags--no block-level/inline rules of xhtml are checked}. It's not an exhaustive, rule-based validation routine at all. It's a down & dirty check that nothing egregious is happening. That nothing is going to prevent Sigil from safely saving the epub, and that Sigil's automated routines can be safely run. Use a spec validator plugin if you want to know if an epub is spec-compliant.

[AlanHK]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Use a spec validator plugin if you want to know if an epub is spec-compliant.

Which I know and obviously did, as my initial post quoted the epubcheck error.

I mentioned other things that did not complain, not just the WFC.
It's just that epubcheck seems to be the only thing that is bothered by this non-compliance. Despite being horrible code, it displays perfectly well in iBooks, for instance.
But I'll try to fix it just to shut epubcheck up, makes it hard to see other errors when it blurts 50 warnings about this when I do a check.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

It's just that epubcheck seems to be the only thing that is bothered by this non-compliance. Despite being horrible code, it displays perfectly well in iBooks, for instance.

There's tons of stuff that epubcheck (and a w3c xhtml check) barks at that "looks OK" in most renderers. That's because most display engines tend to be more forgiving than the specs that (attempt to) govern the markup they're tasked with rendering.

[theducks]

I think of a span as 'adjusting' part of the block (bold, italic, bigger, smaller), but it is always part of a single block.

OTOH I use Div as more of a 'grouping container' for P or H type blocks

I know, some folk use Div instead of P
I also use Blocquote instead of a Div in most cases. Why not? Unless you need a non-standard exception.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by theducks

I think of a span as 'adjusting' part of the block (bold, italic, bigger, smaller), but it is always part of a single block.

OTOH I use Div as more of a 'grouping container' for P or H type blocks

I know, some folk use Div instead of P
I also use Blocquote instead of a Div in most cases. Why not? Unless you need a non-standard exception.

I know I liked you for some reason!