[Bug 8038] Permit closing tag for new, void elements - for legacy compatibility = XHTML alignment

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8038





--- Comment #7 from Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>  2009-10-26 16:50:18 ---
(In reply to comment #4)

Since you ask me to repeat myself: Regarding <span>, <img> and "work exactly
like".

<span>: In legacy text/html user agents <source> should have worked exactly
like <span>. In reality, <source /> will – unlike <span /> and unlike common
belief [*] – get closed in Internet Explorer. Whereas </source> works as
expected all over.

<img>: <img> is a void element, like <source>.

"work exactly like" - AUTHORS: Authors should be able to take advantage of the
common knowledge that, in legacy user agents, <unknownelement> gets closed by
</unknownelement>. Thus they should be permitted to use </source>, so as to
avoid additional hacks just to close the element and to avoid that authors
avoid using <source> (or even <video> itself) due to lack of support for
<source> as a void element.

"work exactly like" - SYNTAX: for new void elements, the syntax should work
exactly like in XML/XHTML. Meaning: <source></source> should be a permitted
syntax.

"work exactly like" - LEGACY USER AGENTS: No one govern how legacy user agents
react to the void <source> or <source />. Some legacy user agents vendors
claims to support <video> and have offered demos of the support. Most of these
demos never seem to include <source>. September 2008 you demoed support for
<video> in a Firefox nightly. http://www.whatwg.org/demos/2008-sept/  You
emphasized in your speech that you did not want to talk in future tense. Still
there were no support for <source> in that demo. You spoke as if you tested a
user agent that supported <video> (despite that you, in this bug report, try to
make support for <source> and <video> synonymous things). (There are, btw,
several instances of "<video />" on the web, and the do not everytime appear in
a XHTML serialization ...)

"work exactly like" - for NEW USER AGENTS: New user agents should support
<source> as a void element. They should react the same whether the code is
written <source>, <source /> or <source></source>. And current Safari release
as well as the latest betas of Firefox 3.6 already do behave like that. (Opera
10.10 beta introduces support for <source> but doesn't yet treat
<source>xyz</source> like <source />xyz.)

[*] Your own comment about the effect of  document.createElement() in IE was: 
"This piece of information makes building an HTML5 compatibility shim for IE7
far easier than had previously been assumed." 
http://ln.hixie.ch/?count=1&start=1201080691  However, the effect of "/>" in
that context, was not discussed then, AFAIK. The effect will be that authors
can handle IE6, IE7 and IE8 even more simply. While the rest of the flock will
be left to hacks - or simply be forgottten.  


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Received on Monday, 26 October 2009 16:50:22 UTC