[whatwg] <p> elements containing other block-level elements

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Fri Apr 8 07:11:27 PDT 2005


On Fri, 8 Apr 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > At the end of the day this would just be saying "in XML you can also 
> > do this". Avoiding those options for people who serialise to both XML 
> > and HTML is relatively easy, just like avoiding xml:base and MathML.
> 
> Detecting stuff in non-XHTML namespaces is significantly easier than 
> detecting incompatible use of XHTML elements.

Very true. But you have to do the checking anyway. Say someone wrote this 
(non-conforming) markup:

   ...
   <p>
    <input> Test </input>
   </p>
   ...

You wouldn't be able to serialise it to HTML. Or this:

   <style>
    <em> { color: red; }
   </style>

Again, you need special serialisation code for that. (In fact you need 
special code for <style> in general, since it's PCDATA in XHTML and CDATA 
in HTML.)

Come to think of it, you also need special processing for <script> -- 
processing that actually changes the script, since for legacy UAs you need 
the non-namespaced methods but in XML you have to use the namespaced ones.

So I don't think the situation is as clear cut as all that.

Is catching <ul>s inside <p>s something that crosses the line?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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