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

[Anne van Kesteren]

James Graham wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure about "a good reason". Mostly consistency I guess and 
giving people a single option.

Note that parsers most likely have to parse <foo />, <foo/> and <foo> in 
the same way in order to be compatible with the web. That however, does 
not make it valid HTML5, that just makes the web work.

Same for leaving out non optional end tags. HTML5 should define what 
should happen to the DOM tree. Leaving them out should be invalid.


> 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.

Real-world HTML4 is exactly what HTML5 is going to represent. I'm not 
sure if I understand this correctly.


-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/>