Next message: Christian Smith: "Re: Minimized tags error"
From: Masayasu Ishikawa <mimasa@w3.org>
To: csmith@barebones.com
Cc: www-validator@w3.org
Message-Id: <20010328083358B.mimasa@w3.mag.keio.ac.jp>
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 08:33:58 +0900
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