[HTML5] [html] Elements within "title"?

[Henri Sivonen]

On Feb 27, 2007, at 13:44, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>
>> For compatibility reasons in HTML, title cannot contain elements  
>> because of the way it is parsed.
>
> Compatibility with what?

With the existing practice.

> I guess you are thinking in terms of WHAT WG only, taking existing  
> browsers as something that HTML needs to be compatible with.

It is not only in terms of WHATWG. It is in terms of market reality.

> Logically speaking, you are saying that the <title> element cannot  
> contain elements because it has #PCDATA content, i.e. because it  
> cannot contain elements. It is true that changing this _could_  
> break pages on some existing browsers.

More to the point, it *would* break things.

>> It would be possible to do so in XHTML, but then that would be  
>> another incompatibility between the 2 languages
>
> They are already completely incompatible, except in the trickery  
> sense that you can masquerade XHTML 1.0 so that it will be eaten by  
> existing browsers as the tag soup HTML that they can process.

I think he meant the serializability of conforming XHTML document  
trees as HTML.

> The real issue is whether the proposed extension would have too  
> serious drawbacks on current browsers that (probably) parse the  
> <title> content in a straightforward manner

For reference, this is "RCDATA" in the HTML5 parsing algorithm.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/