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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Apr 12, 2005, at 12:31, Ian Hickson wrote:

> Many people feel that a minor typo in their document should not cause
> their page to stop rendering altogether. I have spoken with a _lot_ of
> authors who really do not like XML's draconian error handling, 
> including
> many authors who are always ensuring their documents are valid.

Recently, I made a typo and left out the slash in an end tag (on the 
tag soup side). Since Gecko forces tag soup into a tree, I didn't 
notice anything in Firefox. However, in IE my script produced 
exceedingly weird results. It turned out that IE had created a non-tree 
DOM and my single typo had multiplied thanks to cloneNode preserving 
the non-treeness. It would have saved me debugging time if I had seen a 
parse error message up front.

> I myself have occasionally made typos and other mistakes that, if I had
> used XML, would have left my site unusable, without my knowledge, for
> several hours at a time.

 From the "tools will save us" point of view, you need a text editor 
that tries to parse the doc using an XML parser when you intend to 
write XML.

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