Re: [XHTML1.1] Error in Conformance Definition document?

Kelly wrote:
> Yes, I thought the point of XHTML was to transfer AWAY from HTML-as-tag-soup 
> by forcing the XML conformance rules on authors...
> 

Not really.  The reason that XML requires explicit opening and closing 
tags, and that XML language processors must give up if this is violated, 
is that it allows the use of mixed name spaces in user agents that have 
no a priori knowledge of the syntax of one of the namespaces, or, for 
general purpose tools, for all of them.

HTML was designed so that most unambiguous omissions are still valid 
(which seems to be how someone earlier wanted their tools to work.  The 
tag soup problem, in part, arises from parsers that treat the datastream 
as tags, rather than elements.

If you want to have HTML that is checked for having all optional tags 
present, you can make a fairly mechanical change to the DTD and run the 
file through the sgmls validator (as used by the W3C one) locally.

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2007 06:19:34 UTC