Re: [VE][70] Error Message Feedback

On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 09:07 -0600,
www-validator.ttancredi@spamgourmet.com wrote:

> In XML you cannot leave an element open.  You have 1 way (that applies
> to every element) to close an element: close the element by using an end
> tag.  You have 1 way (that applies only to an empty element) to close an
> element: open and close the element by using an empty element tag.  

No. <foo></foo> and <foo/> are equivalent. 

> In HTML you CAN leave an element open.

No. In HTML some elements have optional start and/or end tags, and some
have forbidden end tags. In these cases the element is still closed,
even if there isn't a tag to do so explicitly.

> meta is an empty element.  For compatibility, XHTML retains the HTML
> rule that you cannot close an empty element by using an end tag.

No. Appendix C of XHTML 1.0 provide guidelines that let authors do fuzzy
hand waving and pretend that their XHTML is really HTML (by serving it
with a text/html content-type). Appendix C XHTML isn't /really/
compatible with HTML, and conforming clients will spew ">" characters
all over the place after performing error correction on large chunks of
the <head> section.

Appendix C doesn't provide any rules for XHTML though.

-- 
David Dorward                           <http://dorward.me.uk/>
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another."
                             -- The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Received on Friday, 13 January 2006 07:30:37 UTC