Re: separator/seperator Re: About XHTML 2.0

> Empty elements crept into HTML due to hasty design and lack of structural
> approach. This is explained in some detail at my
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/empty.html

I read through your document and have found it enlightening, but not
in support of your position.

I found the SMGL approach that says that empty tags represent replaced
content to be a very good one. The XHTML approach of finding whatever
we can to fill that content whole seems so arbitraty to me to be on
the verge of religion.

Not every relationship is encapsulation.
Not every element has child elements.

There needs to be a way to specify content should be replaced by
something that can't be represented by text (images, controls).

As I understand it, there are two types of tags in HTML.
Organizational tags and content tags. Organizational tags have
non-empty content and content tags have empty content.

It seems like the HTML WG has been desperately trying to find some
universal truth akin to the unified theory of everything. But it's not
there. It's best if we just realize that there are in fact two
different classifications. The question I put to all of you is, if
this bothers you, perhaps we need different syntaxes for the different
types of elements.

Orion Adrian

Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2005 18:06:48 UTC