Re: Recent ERB votes

On Thu, 7 Nov 1996 08:17:00 -0800, bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM (Jon Bosak)
wrote:

>The idea is *not* to grandfather in existing HTML; in fact, the spec
>bars virtually all existing HTML documents just because of the end-tag
>requirement.  Rather, the idea is to make it *possible* to create new
>documents that are both valid HTML (according to the HTML 3.2 spec)
>and valid XML.  Such documents would look a lot different from the
>typical HTML page today, but they would have the advantage of working
>in both the HTML and XML application environments.  So HTML users can
>run a normalizer on their existing HTML document bases and get
>documents that will continue to be viewable by current HTML browsers
>but will also work in new XML browsers.  Without making the one
>extremely limited concession to existing HTML empty elements that came
>out of our final round of deliberations, this would not be possible.

Yes it would. As Paul Prescod has pointed out, IE and NS 3.0 can both accept
end-tags for empty elements. So XML-to-be-read-by-HTML-browsers can have
<img></img>. As you claim it is not an objective for XML to "grandfather"
existing HTML, there is no need to support <img> without an end-tag, and
therefore no need to pollute XML with knowledge of specific element types.

Received on Sunday, 10 November 1996 14:48:02 UTC