- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 17:54:37 -0800
- To: jonathan chetwynd <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
At 10:18 PM +0000 1/20/02, jonathan chetwynd wrote: >"/>" in head of xhtml page being rendered by emacs-w3 (gnu 20.7.1) > >Has anyone else has seen this using a different browser? > >is there a solution other than just waiting for an upgrade, or did I >miss some vital code out? > >http://www.peepo.com/index.html currently demonstrates this rather >boorishly... It's appropriate behavior for an HTML browser. In HTML, a funny character like /> indicates the premature end of a tag, and thus "something else." In a <head> statement, you can't have free-floating character data outside of an element. So this is (properly, I believe) interpreted to mean "we've reached something which isn't <head>, so this must be <body>, with both the closing tag for <head> and the start tag of <body> left off." (Recall that in HTML, closing and opening tags for <head> and <body> are optional, and will be inferred if they are not provided.) And so the /> is the start of your body content, so it gets displayed. This is a case where XHTML -- even XHTML written according to the W3C's guidelines for proper compatibility, e.g. spaces before the / -- can cause problems in HTML-compliant browsers. XHTML is _not_ designed to be 100% backwards-compatible with HTML browsers, only about 99.44% compatible. --Kynn -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> http://kynn.com Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire http://kynn.com/resume January Web Accessibility eCourse http://kynn.com/+d201 Forthcoming: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours
Received on Sunday, 20 January 2002 21:11:52 UTC