- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 22:18:44 +0000
Ian Hickson wrote: > On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Leons Petrazickis wrote: >> This rigmarole is going to repeat on every site that has converted to >> XHTML sent as text/html. People are emotionally invested in the idea of >> trailing slashes. Websites have complex codebases, and going through >> them removing trailing slashes on singleton elements would be very hard. > > If people want to make HTML5 syntactically compatible with XHTML1, such > that XHTML1 documents don't cause syntax errors in HTML5, we'll have to do > a whole lot more than just allowing trailing /s. I don't really see why > that would be a goal, though. Going further, if we want to make documents > in general compliant with HTML5, then we've got our work cut out for us -- > at least 78% of documents are syntactically incorrect today (not counting > things like trailing /s in attributes, or missing DOCTYPEs -- if you > include those, the number is more like 93%). I tentatively support the idea that trailing slashes on "singleton"[1] elements should not be a parse error. I don't think it has any actual technical merit but I think it will be helpful in getting developer mindshare; a lot of people have drunk the "Zeldman Koolaid" and have the ideas of XHTML, clean markup, CSS, and conformance to standards in general all mushed together in their brain[2]. For these people (who I think represent the upper quartile of web developers in terms of commitment to good markup) the trailing slash in empty elements is the syntax of a new generation - it is a symbol that represents everything that has changed in web design since 1996 - as intrinsically useless as a fashionable designer label but just as seductive. [1] I find that name quite confusing as it suggests there should only be one in the entire document. [2] c.f. the "code is poetry" comment in the Wordpress bug report despite the fact that most here would argue HTML 4 as text/html is considerably more poetic than XHTML as text/html. -- "The universe doesn't care what you believe. The wonderful thing about science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes" --- http://xkcd.com/c154.html
Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2006 14:18:44 UTC