Re: Making the HTML language self-describing

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009, Martin Atkins wrote:
> 
> There is the potential to find them in the DOM via script and turn them 
> into something else.

Very few of the void elements so far would be suitable for this; I don't 
see any reason to expect that to change. But in any case if you're able to 
script around the lack of UA support, then just fix the lack of parser 
support while you're at it.


> However, my concern isn't making the void elements actually do 
> something, but rather the cascading failure that happens as soon as you 
> use an unknown void element.
>
> The entire page shouldn't break just because one element is not 
> supported by the parser.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm not aware of any cascading failure that 
comes from using any of the void elements proposed in a UA that doesn't 
parse it as expected.

Also, come to think of it, you can also work around any parsing 
limitations by just putting the void elements always at the end of an 
element, e.g. <span><eventsource></span>. The only new void element in 
HTML5 where that wouldn't work is <source>, which I wouldn't really expect 
people to use until <video> is widely supported anyway.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 8 January 2009 02:03:42 UTC