- From: Philip Taylor (Webmaster) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:22:36 +0100
- To: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- CC: "public-html@w3.org WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Robert Burns wrote: > I still don't understand how we disagree here. For any specification the > issue of what is or is not valid has to be a part of the conversation. > Disabling null end tags in a hypothetical HTML 4.02 DTD makes the use of > <br /> valid HTML 4.02 (and valid SGML). It's also already valid XHTML > 1. So I'm not sure where we have a disagreement here. Are you just > saying you don't want null end tags disabled in HTML? Then that's just > another part of the language that we discuss, deliberate and work out > (the same as deciding whether it should have a P element). I don't think it's really a matter of what I want, it's more an issue of the logic (or lack thereof) behind it. Ever since HTML was created (as a dialect of SGML), NETs have been a part of the language. The fact that few if any browsers actually implemented them is neither here nor there : documents that used them correctly were valid (modulo other things), those that used them incorrectly were invalid (-- ditto --). Now there is a suggestion that NETs could be removed w.e.f. *HTML 4.02 (which isn't within our aegis, strictly speaking), but to what end ? To allow documents that were previously invalid to become valid, if the DOCTYPE werechanged ? What sort of reason is that ? Or is it more that some XHTML documents could then be valid HTML documents ? Again, to what end ? Even worse (assuming that browsers do not alter their behaviour based on the DOCTYPE, much as I would like them so to do), you would end up with a situation in which an HTML 4.01 document using <meta ... /> in the head region would be flagged as "invalid" by the validator, whilst an *HTML 4.02 document with exactly the same markup would be flagged as valid, yet both would render identically in an HTML 5 compliant browser. Could we really explain that to the web-page-author-on-the-number-57-Clapham-Common-omnibus ?! Philip TAYLOR
Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 17:23:07 UTC