- From: Braden N. McDaniel <braden@endoframe.com>
- Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 03:09:26 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Jan Roland Eriksson <jrexon@newsguy.com>
- cc: "L. David Baron" <dbaron@fas.harvard.edu>, www-html@w3.org
On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Jan Roland Eriksson wrote: > On Mon, 3 Apr 2000 19:53:18 -0400 (EDT), "L. David Baron" > <dbaron@fas.harvard.edu> wrote: > > >Section 9.3.1 of the HTML spec [1] says "User agents should ignore > >empty P elements." I am curious what the authors of this line intended > >it to mean... > > > 1) An empty P element should be ignored at the parsing stage, and > > therefore should not appear in the DOM and should not be affected > > by style sheets. > > This is the correct interpretation. > > The purpose of markup is to provide structure to content, i.e. a final > marked up document shall appear as a serialized representation of a > structure where we have "content embedded in markup". (nota bene, not > the other way around, because that would be "tag soup" :) > > If there's nothing to mark-up, there's no motivation for markup either. Indeed, but it is *not* the parser's job to fix errant document structure! It is the parser's job to read the markup that's there. And as long as it's valid, the DOM tree should have a direct correspondence to the plaintext representation. -- Braden N. McDaniel braden@endoframe.com <URL:http://www.endoframe.com>
Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2000 03:06:26 UTC