[Bug 5444] [SER] Non-XHTML elements with XHTML output method

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=5444


C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com




--- Comment #6 from C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>  2009-02-05 19:03:58 ---
A little further investigation shows that the view I espoused in
comment #4 was ill-informed.  I do think the goal of making
legacy browsers ignore namespaced elements is worth trying to
achieve.  But as far as I can tell, both current and legacy
browsers achieve the "ignore tags you don't understand" goal
under the current rules; it is (as far as I can tell) not
necessary to make special provision forbidding serialization of
unknown empty elements as <foo/> or <foo:bar/>; both forms are
treated just like <foo /> and <foo></foo>, i.e. both are
successfully ignored.

I had thought that the form <foo/> would cause legacy browsers,
or legacy mode in some current browsers, to treat / or /> or > as
content characters; this appears not to be the case.  Tests on
current-ish versions of Safari, Firefox, and Opera, and also on
Netscape Navigator 4.79 and IE 5.5 (the oldest browsers anyone I
could find on the spur of the moment had access to) show no / or
> anywhere in the display, for any of <br>, <br/>, <br />,
<br></br>.

If I now understand correctly, the blank in <br /> is required
for legacy browsers not because otherwise / or /> gets displayed,
but because <br/> has no effect (i.e. the element is ignored,
presumably because the legacy parser thinks it has found an
element named "br/").

During the WG call this morning I had agreed to file a request
for enhancement suggesting that HTML and XHTML modes provide
special rules for empty unknown elements.  That no longer seems
necessary or sensible.


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Received on Thursday, 5 February 2009 19:04:09 UTC