Re: self-closing tags in html5

Hi William,

If you would like your ideas to officially be given consideration, I
encourage you to start by filing  a bug with the  W3C HTML working
group. I would also encourage you to do this before October 1. An
excellent reference on how to do this is:

How to Comment and When
By Shelley Powers.
http://realtech.burningbird.net/how-comment-and-when

Also see:

The HTML5 Document Structure
By Shelley Powers.
http://realtech.burningbird.net/reviewcomment-w3c-html5-specification/html5-document-structure

Timeline to Last Call
By Maciej Stachowiak.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Sep/0074.html

Best Regards,
Laura


On 9/25/10, William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu> wrote:
> In the spec at 8.1.2.1 (6) (for the text/html serialization):
>
>    Then, if the element is one of the void elements, or if the
>    element is a foreign element, then there may be a single U+002F
>    SOLIDUS character (/).  This character has no effect on void
>    elements, but on foreign elements it marks the start tag as
>    self-closing.
>
> It would be better to allow self-closing tags on all de facto empty
> elements, foreign or not and defined-empty or not.  That is: for any
> tag name "foo", the markup "<foo/>" should be equivalent to
> "<foo></foo>".  If "foo" is a defined-empty element in the html
> name space, then all of "<foo>", "<foo/>", and "<foo></foo>" should
> be equivalent.
>
> This is better because (1) authors are given more choice and (2) DOM
> building is simplified.
>
> For example, while it is true that major browsers seem to treat "<p/>"
> as an open tag, the relevant question for backward comptatibility is
> whether anyone has been relying on the idea that "<p/>" can be used to
> begin a non-empty paragraph.
>
>                                     -- Bill
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> William F. Hammond                   Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics
> hammond@albany.edu                            The University at Albany
> http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/                    Albany, NY (U.S.A.)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> P.S.  It is true that the W3C HTML 4 & 4.01 specifications formally
> (and unwisely for text/html) enabled full SHORTTAG in the accompanying
> SGML declaration.  So, for example,
>
>      <p/Hello guys!  This is text in
>         a formally legal paragraph. /
>
> is a correctly marked HTML-4 "p" element according to the
> specification.  But there was no significant appearance of this markup
> across the web in text/html.  (It is simple to modify the SGML
> declaration for HTML 4 to disable this usage.)  A spec compliant
> implementation of HTML 4 would, however, render the content of
>
>      <p/>Hello guys!</p>
>
> as ">Hello guys!".

-- 
Laura L. Carlson

Received on Sunday, 26 September 2010 09:25:12 UTC