Lol - you are right of course. I wish I could offer some explanation as to why I put that in there. I left the code for quite a while (several months) and have forgotten the reason. I know that in the past I have used non-semantic spans in order to attach an extra backgound image (as only one background image is allowed per element) and I have also used non-semantic spans for image replacement. However, in this context it just seems wrong and it shouldn't be there. I should have validated first.