Re: Don't reopen active formatting elements for whitespace

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009, Simon Pieters wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:59:46 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Thu, 16 Jul 2009, Simon Pieters wrote:
> > 
> > I actually studied this quite carefully when originally writing the 
> > spec, and originally made whitespace not reopen formatting elements, 
> > but it turns out that this causes incompatibilities with IE in a 
> > number of cases that are quite hard to explicitly handle separately. I 
> > agree that it leads to an unfortunate number of nodes near whitespace.
> 
> What are those cases? Do you know a page that breaks if we don't do 
> this?

I don't remember the details, but for example this would look different:

   <pre><div><u>X</div> X</pre>

...as would this:

   <span><u>X</span>
   X


> Clearly Firefox gets away with not reopening for LF characters.

Firefox also "got away" with making parsing dependent on TCP packet 
boundaries. I don't know how much faith we want to put into the old Gecko 
parser. Firefox is the only browser I could find that didn't underline the 
space in the second example above.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 19:26:56 UTC