[whatwg] Allow trailing slash in always-empty HTML5 elements?
Sam Ruby
rubys at intertwingly.net
Tue Nov 28 13:20:31 PST 2006
In response to a weblog post of mine[1], Ian stated[2]:
we can’t make trailing “/” characters meaningful — it would
change how about 49% of the Web is parsed
Just to make sure that we are talking about the same thing, let me make
a much more carefully scoped proposal.
In HTML5, there are a number of elements with a content model of empty:
area, base, br, col, command, embed, hr, img, link, meta, and param.
If HTML5 were changed so that these elements -- and these elements alone
-- permitted an optional trailing slash character, what percentage of
the web would be parsed differently? Can you cite three independent
examples of existing websites where the parsing would diverge?
As an additional constraint, I am explicitly suggesting that the
"Attribute value (unquoted) state" not be changed - slashes in this
state would continue to be appended to the current attribute's value.
The basis for my question is the observation that the web browsers that
I am familiar with apparently already operate in this fashion, this
usage seems to have crept into quite a number of diverse places, and all
this is coupled with Lachlan's observations[3] on what it would take to
change the popular WordPress application to produce HTML5 compliant output.
As a side benefit of this change, I believe that I could modify my
weblog to be simultaneously both HTML5 and XHTML5 compliant, modulo the
embedded SVG content, something that would needs to be discussed separately.
- Sam Ruby
[1] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2006/11/28/Meet-the-New-Boss
[2] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2006/11/28/Meet-the-New-Boss#c1164743684
[3] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2006/11/24/Feedback-on-XHTML#c1164720800
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