Yeah; where it gets thorny is often where links are involved in the span; then I usually go with inline-block, myself, which was something I just kinda pulled out of my butt one night years ago, but it's done the trick a lot of times since. I'm really not sure if I have the span.de CSS on my journal block displayed or not, but I'll check now, since it seems to seriously prettify things. :)

Edit: Yeah, actually, I do have it block displayed:

.de{display:block; padding: 4px; width: 98%; border: 1px solid #c3c0ba; margin-top: 1em!important;font-size: 80%;
background: #F3F5F2; color:#af230c;font-weight:bold; font-style:oblique;}

I've added so much code to the original layout I literally cannot recall all of it, but at least now that's cleared up. :)