Re: Liaison statement on fragment identifiers from Linking WG

[Steven Pemberton:]

| I was under the impression that the fact that the "space before /"
| quirk in empty elements (like <br />) works on old browsers was one of
| the reasons for choosing the <br/> syntax for XML. That was one of the
| motivations for creating the guidelines.

Nope.  The first time I heard of the "space before /" hack was in
XHTML.  The syntax "<foo/>" for an empty element was chosen because it
is, believe it or not, legal SGML.  Yes, ISO 8879:1986 SGML.  Given
the right SGML declaration, "/>" is a null end tag or "NET," hence the
name "stupid NET trick" as the subject line for the discussion that
led to this decision.  If I remember correctly, the Web-SGML TC
generalized this empty-element syntax for SGML.  But the space-before
business is pure XHTML.

Jon