Re: Void elements in HTML

Philip Taylor wrote:
> 
> Julian Reschke wrote:
>> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>  > post-HTML4 is not and will lead to even bigger confusion. (Authors are
>>  > already pretty confused that they have write e.g. 
>> <textarea></textarea>
>>  > rather than <textarea/>. See e.g. the amount of duplicates on
>>  > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162653 Your suggestion
>>  > would just make that worse.)
>>
>> So how many pages would we break if we actually made "<textarea/>" 
>> equivalent to "<textarea></textarea>"?
> 
> If I search for the pattern (?i)<textarea[^>]*/> in about 130K pages 
> from dmoz.org earlier this year, then all I find is:
> 
> http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0013/boal.shtml -- <textarea 
> id="frmComment" name="comment" rows="6" cols="30"/></textarea>
> 
> http://www.hockeycanada.ca/ -- partbody += "<textarea id=\"" + qn + "\" 
> name=\"" + qn + "\" class=\"survey\" cols=\"" + qwidth + "\" rows=\"" + 
> qheight + "\" />" + qa + "<\/textarea>";
> 
> http://www.arhitektura.co.yu/ -- <textarea type="text" cols="27" 
> class="inputbox" rows="4" name="msg" maxlength="80" onkeypress="return 
> handleEnter(this, event)"/></textarea>
> 
> Only the second of those would break (and only if qa != ""). So it's not 
> a relatively widespread issue in that set of the pages.
> 
> 
> http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%3Ctextarea%5B%5E%3E%5D*%2F%3E finds 
> more that would break:
> ...

I just checked some (~10) that are reported for lang:html, and it seems 
that a significant amount of them actually reflect empty textareas, be 
it by mistake, or because the content actually is XHTML (potentially 
served as HTML).

These cases would be *fixed*, not *broken*, by allowing the empty 
element notation.

BR, Julian