Quasi Wellformedness

Dear W3C Markup Validator developers,

many HTML authors are not familiar with the 'SHORTTAG' SGML features, 
neither are most available browsers (even acknowledged in 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3>). Therefore I 
suggest to add an option for "quasi wellformedness" check of HTML 
documents to the Extended Interface, where 'FEATURES', esp. 'MINIMIZE', 
in the SGML declaration of HTML 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/sgmldecl.html> are changed, see for 
example 
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=m3654u4dj2.fsf%40email.bednarz.nl>, 
which has

     SHORTTAG
       STARTTAG
         EMPTY    NO  -- no <> --
         UNCLOSED NO  -- no <foo<bar> --
         NETENABL NO  -- no <foo/bar/ --
       ENDTAG
         EMPTY    NO  -- no </> --
         UNCLOSED NO  -- no </foo<bar> --
       ATTRIB
         DEFAULT  YES -- <foo> = <foo bar="default"> --
         OMITNAME NO  -- <foo bar="baz">, not <foo baz> --
         VALUE    NO  -- <foo bar="baz">, not <foo bar=baz> --.

I prefer

       ENDTAG
         EMPTY    YES -- </> --

and

       ATTRIB
         OMITNAME YES -- <foo baz>, "boolean" attributes --

and maybe you want

   FEATURES
     MINIMIZE
       OMITTAG  NO,

too. Note that HTML (4 at least) already uses Web SGML (Annexes J an K 
of ISO 8879):

   <!SGML  "ISO 8879:1986 (WWW)"

So there was actually no need to restrict 'SHORTTAG' to the simple 
format ('YES' or 'NO'), except for backwards compatibility. I assume 
there is also something like /character reference close/ (CRC) or /~ 
end/ (CRE) -- ';', which could be required.


I think this has been suggested before, when I used to follow this 
mailing list, but I couldn't find it mentioned in the bugtracker.

Regards,

	Christoph Päper

Received on Monday, 18 July 2005 22:14:06 UTC