Re: [OT] Web site accessibility-layers

On Fri, 18 Apr 2003, James Craig wrote:

> I was referring to the closing slash on empty elements. If you are 
> referring to something like <em /> then yes, it will break, but what's 
> the point of an empty em, anyway? <br />, <hr />, <img />, <meta />, 

David just told you why that's wrong, but his point seems to have gone
right over your head.

An SGML-compliant browser encountering <br /> will *display* a line
break followed by a greater-than symbol, which is just untidy loose
text.  Same applies to <img />, <hr /> - the slash closes the tag so
the greater-than is loose text.  With <meta /> the situation is a
good deal worse, for reasons you can find regularly rehearsed on
the www-validator mailinglist.

>	point seems to have co
> etc. all work fine in 'older' and 'newer' browsers.

Does emacs still (as it used to) apply SGML correctly and show up
that error?  Anyone here using it for browsing?

> One of the main reasons I'm using XHTML is for forward compatility with 
> new agents that /may/ only accept XML.

Then when that happens, offer them a suitable transform and serve them
your documents as xhtml.  Elementary.

-- 
Nick Kew