G'day BrowserUk,

Perl Monks Approved HTML tags has span as an allowed tag (with class and title as allowed attributes).

Did you see different documentation elsewhere?

Seems you're right. Though without the ability to supply inline styling (or at least an id) it might as well be totally disallowed.

The lack of a style attribute was also my first thought; however, on reflection, it's really a lack of a style element that's the (bigger) problem.

To elaborate on that, I have a script which generates HTML containing syntax-highlighted code, that looks something like this:

<pre class="syntax-highlight">
    ...
    <span class="variable">x</span> <span class="operator">=</span> <s
+pan class="string">...
    ...
</pre>
[download]

While I wouldn't want to change, for example, every <span class="string"> instance to, say, <span style="color: #00ff00; background-color: #000000">; I might like to add one simple block like:

<style>
...
pre.syntax-highlight > span.string {
    color:            #00ff00;
    background-color: #000000;
}
...
</style>
[download]

However, beyond that, which really just shifts the focus of where style is missing from, I do agree with you. id is not an allowed attribute for any allowed element; the lang and dir attributes are only allowed with the blockquote element; and so on.

There may be reasons why things are this way. Perhaps someone from pmdev could provide some feedback.

-- Ken