[Bug 12817] The hr element (and others) Compliments for a great piece of work. However, one issue threatens to undermine the future of HTML5: wellformedness is not required. This may generally lead to ambiguity (did the author intentionally omit the closing tag?) and

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12817

Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> changed:

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--- Comment #2 from Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> 2011-05-30 22:30:43 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #0)
> Compliments for a great piece of work. However, one issue threatens to
> undermine the future of HTML5: wellformedness is not required.

This has not been an impediment to HTML adoption in the 20 years since it was
first created.  In contrast, XHTML tried to solve the well-formedness problem
and failed miserably.  So the evidence is squarely in the opposite direction:
requiring well-formedness would destroy the future of HTML.

> This may
> generally lead to ambiguity (did the author intentionally omit the closing
> tag?)

The spec generally makes markup invalid in cases where the author's intent is
unclear, and only allows closing tags to be omitted in cases where the intent
is clear.  If there are specific cases where the spec allows markup that you
think might indicate authoring error, I suggest you file bugs on those specific
cases.

> and slower parsing (larger context required).

Empirical evidence suggests that parsing HTML is not much slower than parsing
XML: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/cost-of-html/

> It would be a missed
> opportunity if HTML5 would not meet this generic XML requirement.

XHTML attempted to require XML well-formedness, and was a disastrous failure. 
Trying to go back to XHTML when it had ten years to succeed and did not is not
much of a missed opportunity.

But fortunately for you, HTML5 does support an XML serialization, XHTML5.  You
are free to write and serve your own pages as well-formed XML if you so choose.
 HTML5 is not going to require that everyone do this, however.

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Received on Monday, 30 May 2011 22:30:47 UTC