Re: [WICG/webcomponents] Custom 'void' or self-closing elements (HTML parser changes) (#624)

Since this is the second time this same statement has been brought up in this issue, I wanted to mention that no‐one seriously cares about that document, at least not since 2007, when the document was last updated.

It’s not an unreasonable statement, but over time, people have come to realize that it doesn’t actually work well (for the Web, at least). It doesn’t really matter if “authors really want it”, if implementors don’t implement it, either because they can’t or because they don’t want to, the specification becomes moot, as a series of problems arrive.

If the spec is implemented inaccurately in ways that leave discrepancies between it and implementations (in incompatible ways), new implementations won’t want to follow it and risk breaking existing websites. They will prefer to try to copy the behavior of existing implementations, and that opens the opportunity to the implementations themselves to differ. (Which is exactly what the spec is trying to avoid!)

Also note that whatever merit that the aforementioned “Priority of Constituencies” paragraph has is limited to *making decisions*, not *changing them*. In this case, the decision of “not allowing either void or self‐closing custom elements” was already made implicitly when custom elements were specified without it. Changing that *now* has different implications than when it was first specified.

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