Re: Void elements in HTML (Was: ZIP-based packages and URI references into them ODF proposal)

Jonas Sicking wrote:
> ...
> The problem that I see (which may or may not be the same one as Julian
> is trying to solve) is one of forwards compatible parsing. I.e. say

Actually, I'm mostly interested in forwards compatible serialization, 
which seems to be just a subset of the parsing problem.

> ...
> If we instead allowed the <killswitch/> syntax, all browsers would
> produce the same DOM making them easier to work with.
> ...

Indeed.

> I *think* void elements is the only thing destroying the ability to
> have forwards compatible parsing right now. If I understand the
> parsing algorithm correctly newly introduced block level elements
> would only produce a different DOM for invalid markup. I.e. markup
> like
> 
> <i><new-block-element>hello</new-block-element></i>
> 
> would produce the same DOM in all browsers, but
> 
> <i><new-block-element>hello</i>hi</new-block-element>
> 
> would produce different DOMs depending on if <new-block-element> is
> recognized as a block-level element or not. Please correct me if I'm
> wrong.
> 
> I actually think it would be great to support the ending-slash syntax
> for all elements in HTML5. I have several times ended up writing
> things like <div id=foo></div>, and having it consistently supported
> in both HTML mode and foreign content mode would actually reduce the
> differences between them which I think is a great thing.
> 
> I have heard of some real world pages that would break if the empty
> element syntax was supported everywhere, however I wonder if it's many
> enough that we need to adjust HTML to accommodate them.
 > ...

And, if that's the case, there's still the option to allow it only on 
certain existing elements *and* future elements.

BR, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 31 December 2008 12:10:06 UTC