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The distinction between block and inline elements always seemed strange to me. The whole difference is that a block element takes up the entire width thus forcing a line break before and after the element, and an inline element only takes up as much as the content. Why not just have one type of element- an inline element where you can also apply custom height/width, and use that? You want line breaks? Insert a <br />, or maybe add a special tag in the CSS for that behavior. The way it's now, I don't see it solving any problem, and instead it only forces a property that in my opinion should be decided by a designer.

So why the two types?

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  • My favorite part of this question is how it uses an inline style for the <br/>, and a <p> tag to get the last line separated from the first paragraph. Perhaps you should start looking at vast differences in visual intention rather than the differences in implementation.
    – riwalk
    Commented Apr 7, 2011 at 19:21
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    While I 100% believe block elements to be useful and disagree with your proposed solution, this is still a great question.
    – Nicole
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 22:15

6 Answers 6

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You say:

You want line breaks? Insert a <br />, or maybe add a special tag in the CSS for that behavior. The way it's now, I don't see it solving any problem, and instead it only forces a property that in my opinion should be decided by a designer.

You are on the right track - style should be decided by the designer.

But, you've got the problem the other way around. Inserting a <br/> tag is actually the option that "forces a property that should be decided by a designer" — inside the markup document, once the <br/> is there, it's there - and only with some tricky/hacky CSS can you remove its effect.

Inline/block elements, on the other hand, are purely elements styled with a convenient default for the common use case. The visual property itself can be changed instantly by a CSS designer with display:inline or display:block.

Take for example the common element for navigation these days - <li>. These are by default block elements, but designers will make them float to appear inline (block has more special properties than just taking up the whole line, but that's a conversation for another day).

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Most elements have a standard formatting... Your question could be extended to say this formatting should be the decision of the designer as well and should be removed. I always just figured it was a starting point and removed the formatting if needed (often it wasn't). But in the end there's some things that are natural. If you have a paragraph for example you expect it to be a block element because thats the nature of a paragraph. Regardless of whether or not elements have default settings such as block or inline I definitely would either way want the ability to specify this option. The reason I say this is IMO its cleaner to break things this way versus throwing a <br /> in the HTML. Does it do the same thing? Yes. But with recent advances in HTML a large effort was focused on making it more of a semantic language where you put less in the HTML as far as formatting goes and more in the CSS. The <br /> means line break which is typically referring to a line break in a paragraph or other sentence containing structure. In the end it doesn't matter to me but I personally want the ability to have block and inline distinction so I hope they never remove that from the CSS side at least!

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This is kind of like saying there is no real difference between paragraphs and sentences. Paragraphs delimit a group of ideas. Typically, a sentence is for a single idea.

The markup is about semantics, not display. Indeed, a designer is free to treat any element that defaults to a block style as inline and vice-versa.

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In LaTeX, there are two modes (not including math mode): the horizontal mode and the vertical mode. The elements (characters) are small boxes that accumulate "horizontally" in paragraph. Then these larger boxes accumulate vertically. This is similar to (X)HTML: inline and block.

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Sounds like an issue of backward compatibility to me. The inline element was probably a later addition to the HTML standard, and so that web pages written in 1992 can still be viewed in 2011, it is still supported - like there are a ton of 19 year old web pages out there...!

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I think the modes of display are so different between block and inline, that a distinction worth making at the markup level.

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