WD-webarch-20031209: Ignoring elements and ignoring tags

1.2.2 para 6 ("For example, from ...") says "from early on in the Web,
HTML agents followed the convention of ignoring unknown elements."  I
think you mean to say "ignoring unknown tags" instead; I think many of
your readers will, like me, understand "tags" as marking the
beginnings and endings of "elements", and many of them may, like me,
be confused at first by this sentence, which seems to mischaracterize
browser behavior.  At least in my experience, browsers ignore tags,
such as the start- and end-tags of 'blink' elements, but do not ignore
elements, which is why the content of 'script' elements must be
wrapped in comments in order to avoid problems with earlier browsers,
which ignore the 'script' tags, but not the 'script' element.  (It is
possible that this sentence is intended to refer to some different
browser behavior, such as ignoring the absence of explicit end-tags,
or the typical decision by browsers to ignore violations of SGML's
element nesting rules; in this case, reformulating the sentence is
even more important.)

Received on Thursday, 4 March 2004 18:15:21 UTC