title: Applying CSS and roles for text blocks instead of inline spans in Sphinx
body: <p>There is <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/4669689/">a previous question</a> that explains how to add a color span to some reStructuredText.</p>
  
  <p>To recap the procedure:</p>
  
  <p>First, you have the role.</p>
  
  <pre><code>.. role:: red
  
  An example of using :red:`interpreted text`
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It translates into as follows.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;p&gt;An example of using &lt;span class="red"&gt;interpreted text&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, you have the red class, you can use CSS for changing colors.</p>
  
  <pre><code>.red {
      color:red;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How do you do this if you want text that spans multiple lines?  For example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>.. role:: red
  
  :red:`paragraph 1
  
        paragraph 2
  
        paragraph 3`
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Where paragraph 1, 2, &amp; 3 would all be "red".  If I try to do this I get the warning message:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>WARNING: Inline interpreted text or phrase reference start-string without end-string.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>It doesn't create the span and inserts ":red:" into the text.  It just doesn't interpret this as a string (as the warning suggests).</p>
  
  <p>Basically, can this be done in reStructuredText, and if it can, how?</p>
  
  <p>I'm using Sphinx 1.1.3.</p>