[whatwg] text/html flavor conformance checkers and <foo />

[James Graham]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Brad Neuberg wrote:
>
>>> What should text/html flavor conformance checkers say about <foo />?
>>>
>>> Silently treat as <foo>> as per SGML?
>>> Silently treat as <foo> as per real world?
>>> Report a warning?
>>> Report an error?
>>>
>>> What about <foo/>?
>>>
>>> I am leaning towards reporting an error.
>>
>>
>> Unfortunately, <foo /> is the real world way of "hacking" XHTML 
>> support into IE, since IE will belch if you give <foo/>.  You also 
>> have to serve it up as text/html for IE.....  You should probably 
>> transform it into what people expect it in the real world, which is 
>> turning <foo /> into <foo>.
>
>
> That was my first though too, until Henri pointed out he was talking 
> about conformance checkers and not about parsers.

Is there a good reason that <foo /> cannot be valid HTML5? Any parser 
which doesn't support <foo /> also doesn't support much of the web 
content produced in the last 2 years. In this case a conformance checker 
could emit a warning (maybe only a strict warning) since it's not 
impossible that people will expect HTML5 to work in a parser that's 
incompatible with real-world HTML4.

-- 
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