RE: Minimized tags error

From: Daniel L. Koger (dkoger@speakeasy.org)
Date: Tue, Mar 27 2001

  • Next message: Charles Williams: "broken html from checklink?"

    Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 20:59:05 -0500 (EST)
    From: "Daniel L. Koger" <dkoger@speakeasy.org>
    To: "'Masayasu Ishikawa'" <mimasa@w3.org>, <csmith@barebones.com>
    Cc: <www-validator@w3.org>
    Message-ID: <002001c0b729$1b86b8d0$6501a8c0@kogers.com>
    Subject: RE: Minimized tags error
    
    Just a comment.  I thought <br>> was treated as <br>&gt; whereas <br />
    would be treated as <br "/" > where "/" is the literal string /.  I was
    going to say that this could make a difference in processing, but I guess it
    doesn't in the cases I could come up with.
    
    Daniel
    
    
    
    -----Original Message-----
    From: www-validator-request@w3.org
    [mailto:www-validator-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Masayasu Ishikawa
    Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 3:34 PM
    To: csmith@barebones.com
    Cc: www-validator@w3.org
    Subject: Re: Minimized tags error
    
    
    Christian Smith <csmith@barebones.com> wrote:
    
    > Why is the validator passing this as valid?
    
    Because this is not invalid.
    
    > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
    > <html>
    >     <head>
    >         <title>Sidebar</title>
    >     </head>
    >     <body>
    >         <p>
    >         252 Riddle Pond Road<br />
    >         WTopsham VT 05086<br />
    >         </p>
    >     </body>
    > </html>
    >
    > This looks like a bug to me. <br /> is an XHTML formatted tag and doesn't
    > belong in an HTML document.
    
    The SGML declaration of HTML 4.01 says "SHORTTAG YES", which allows
    this kind of shorthand markup.  However, in this case the null end-tag
    (NET) delimiter is "/", so ">" is just treated as character data.
    In other words, "<br />" is an equivalent of "<br>>" in this case.
    
    Try the validator with "Show parse tree" option, then you'll see
    that ">" after "<br /" is not parsed as part of markup but as just
    a character in the parse tree.
    
    Regards,
    --
    Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
    W3C - World Wide Web Consortium