Re: Problem with <a name="foo" /> vs. <a name="foo"></a>

On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 17:55, Ryan Holliday wrote:
> Apologies if this has been addressed before, I am not
> a regular reader of the list.  All of the pages of my
> site were previously marked as valid by the online
> validator (http://validator.w3.org/), but I was
> running into errors with <a name="foo" /> 

<a name="foo" /> is perfectly *valid*. Elements with a non-empty content
model may still be empty and minimised - at least as far as XML is
concerned.

The problem is that it violates part of the HTML compatibility
guidelines:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_3

... and that Mozilla, at least when treating it as tag soup, needs
conformance with that particular guideline.

At present, I think that checking for this would be outside the scope of
tasks that the Validator is supposed to perform. At some stage it might
be expanded to perform as a lint, but for the time being it is just a
validator.

As <a name="foo" /> is valid, there is no fault in the validator not
remarking on it.


-- 
David Dorward       <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/>   <http://dorward.me.uk/>

Received on Friday, 30 April 2004 14:44:16 UTC