1  Elements

Elements are the building blocks for articles.

Web pages are text files, but have special character sequences, known as HTML, that tell browsers to make what's contained in them look or behave differently from the text around them. In Smallsite Design, while many elements will have the same names as some raw HTML elements, some are enhanced to be more useful, such as lists having an introduction, whereas others are specially constructed to provide unique functionality, such as the sequence element.

Many blocks contain other blocks, like lists with their items, and there are some inline elements, like quotes, that only contain other inline elements. While in HTML, text sort of floats around and between other elements, in Smallsite Design, text is treated as an element in itself, simply to be able to ensure its equality with other elements when ordering and shifting it around, but also so it can be coloured in its own right, rather than having to be nominally another element. When rendered in the page HTML, it will just be plain text, though it will be inside an element when coloured.

Technically, an article is a hierarchy of elements containing other elements, but when referring to block elements containing other elements, in that case it is that they are tightly functionally coupled and minimum numbers of child elements may be required. Other elements, like sections, are containers that can contain a variety of other elements, or even none, other than their introduction.

Elements are used semantically as their name implies, and are rendered in the page using the corresponding semantic HTML elements in the way that they are supposed to be used, so that when looking at the page HTML, it will have a structure that can be recognised as the structure shown while editing. That is, the generated HTML is fairly clean, and only has minimal extra HTML elements.