[Bug 26424] Tag omission rules for rp could break invalid-but-existing content

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=26424

--- Comment #10 from Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp> ---
(In reply to Robin Berjon from comment #9)
> So, I fixed rp to not autoclose rtc (in c61397b). However I'm confused about
> the rest of the discussion about having it not autoclose anything?

rp to auto-close rtc is a change introduced early this year as you know, and
broke at least one existing site though the site is not valid.

rp to auto-close rt is a change introduced years ago, in earlier HTML5 WD, and
broke some existing sites. Again, though the sites are not valid, IE6-9 renders
such HTML as ruby, and the number of sites the change broke is probably more
than the above. Two examples of such sites are:
http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/rp
http://www.w3schools.com/TAgs/tag_rp.asp
but searching in github gives a lot more examples.

So if we change rp not to auto-close rt, it'd be a breaking change against
early and current HTML5, but is more compatible with IE6-9. The question here
is which is more beneficial for existing contents and for future authors. My
opinion is it's better to change not to auto-close rt. It's unlikely to break
existing contents, it saves sites that were broken by early/current HTML5 spec,
and shouldn't harm future authors almost at all.

Now we started to wonder, should rp auto-close rb or any other elements that
have implied end tags.

Benefits for rp to auto-close rb/others:
* can't think much, little to zero

Downside for rp to auto-close rb/others:
* rp behaves differently from any other tags (if we change it not to auto-close
rt), so it requires additional "if" statement in the spec and code.
* It will auto-close any new elements we may add in future.

Benefits for rp not to auto-close rb/others:
* Saves sites created for IE6-9.

Downsides for rp not to auto-close rb/others:
* Breaks sites created for HTML5 and relies on rp's auto-closing behavior.
Sites that use "rp { display: none; }" are ok, but wchen found some sites use
"ruby > rp { display: none; }" so such sites may break if they omit closing
tags.

By reviewing this, it looks to me that benefits to auto-close and downsides not
to auto-close look much less than benefits not to auto-close and downsides to
auto-close.

Does this clarify? Could you clarify what confused you if not?

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Received on Friday, 8 August 2014 18:35:45 UTC