SHORTTAG NET (was: [whatwg] [web-apps] Some comments)

[Lachlan Hunt]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Aug 2004, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>Maybe other things should be added as well. Example: UAs should render 
>>|<br />| as |<br>| and not as |<br>\n&gt;|.
> 
> Sending the XML variant of Web Apps or Web Forms as text/html is invalid 
> anyway, so we don't need to define that particularly IMHO. In fact frankly 
> I'd rather we supported <foo//.

Would it be at all possible to have this SHORTTAG feature implemented in 
UAs these days? I realise it would cause many XHTML documents to render 
incorrectly, but wouldn't it be possible to extend DOCTYPE sniffing to 
enable this feature if a WHATWG doctype, or even HTML4 Strict doctype 
were detected?  Or, are there already too many documents that use XML 
syntax but having declared an HTML4 doctype, thus causing far more 
problems than benfits?

-- 
Lachlan Hunt

lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au
http://www.lachy.id.au/