SHORTTAG </> again

This got to be a FAQ, but... what's happened to </>?  Have I missed
somthing or is that gone from the HTML5 draft?

I never understood why previous HTML standards discouraged its use.
Empty end tags ought to be an efficient way to combat badly nested tags,
like <b><a></b></a>.  Non-empty end tags are half of what makes the
problem possible in the first place.  (Other half: optional end tags.)

Support for </> would hopefully get people to use it for the sake of
less typing and shorter documents.  Where they do, there won't be any
<b><a></b></a> for browsers to render differently.  Then the browser
won't protect the author from seeing his mistake before he inflicts it
on the Web.

Other SHORTTAGs I don't miss.  In particular "<name1<name2>" and
"<name/.../".  If they wanted optional abbreviations, why not
"<name/...>" instead so SGML would allow use of <> as ordinary
readable parenthesis and no verbose end tags?  <p/foo<strong/bar>>.
Come to think of it, any chance of that in future HTML/XML?

-- 
Hallvard

Received on Friday, 27 February 2009 17:33:16 UTC