- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 22:20:39 +0000 (UTC)
On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Steve Runyon wrote: > > Thanks Ian - so is it fair to say that self-closing singletons should be > _allowed_ but not _required_ -- that either syntax would be accepted as > valid HTML5? That only makes sense to me -- it's backward-compatible > while allowing XHTML compatibility as well. It's a compelling argument. I think basically the argument is "it would help people" and the counter argument is "it would confuse people". We need evidence to back up these arguments so we can make a solid decision. The only relevant data I have is that 50% of the web uses trailing slashes, and only 17% uses XHTML. This could be used to back up either argument: "clearly people think that trailing slashes are allowed, so we should allow them", and "clearly people are confused about trailing slashes, so we should get rid of them altogether". I don't know which is best. > Your point about '<p />test' being the same as '<p>test</p>' is very > interesting. To clarify, '<p />test' is the same as '<p>test</p>' because it's the same as '<p >test' -- the "/" character is completely ignored by browsers. > That's not something I've ever done (that I'm aware of, anyway), and it > surprises me that it works that way. As a divergent example -- at least > in IE6 -- '<div />' is treated as an inline element rather than a > block...that's probably non-standard behavior, and in any case it was a > surprise when I encountered it. Could you show an example of this? I couldn't reproduce the behaviour you describe. In my tests, in text/html content, <div> and <div /> acted exactly the same, in all browsers that I tested it with. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2006 14:20:39 UTC