Re: Is XHTML 1.0 2nd ed. Section 4.3 really informative?

Dear list,

I wrote on Mon, 24 Dec 2001 14:06:02 +0900 (JST):
Message-Id: <20011224.140602.68556228.tsuyoshi@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp>

> I agree that it is a good custom to always write end tags for such
> elements even if their contents are empty, because many existing
> ``loose'' (or ``tag soup'') HTML parsers are likely to be confused by
> shorthand representations for empty elements such as ``<span />'' .

One subscriber kindly notified me that XML specification says
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006#NT-EmptyElemTag):
    For interoperability, the empty-element tag should be used, and
    should only be used, for elements which are declared EMPTY.
As it says, you should not use representations like ``<span />'' if
you want to let as many HTML parsers as possible parse your XHTML
documents correctly.

However, this is merely a recommendation.

As I have already posted, current Working Draft (as of October 4,
2001) looks problematic to me in that it is unclear whether the
representations like ``<span />'' are permitted in Strictly Conforming
XHTML Documents or not.  Section 4.3 (informative) states that the
span-like elements ``must'' have end tags.  But I cannot find this
restriction in normative part.  If it is not a mandatory requirement
on Strictly Conforming XHTML Documents, the word ``must'' in Section
4.3 looks confusing.

Best regards,
-- ITO Tsuyoshi  <tsuyoshi@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp> --
-- Department of Information Science           --
--                  in the University of Tokyo --

Received on Monday, 7 January 2002 22:16:49 UTC