[whatwg] Suggestions and questions for Web Forms 2.0, 2004-12-26

Fri Jan 21 04:12:00 PST 2005

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, James Graham wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, James Graham wrote:
> >  
> > > +1 We shouldn't introduce artifical restrictions that can't possibly be
> > > enforced and will quickly lead to reality going out of sync with the spec.
> > >    
> > 
> > We're not introducing any restrictions. We're removing them.
>
> Right. But you're leaving an arbitary and unenforcable restriction in 
> (the element can be anything (block-level) except <div>).

I don't understand what you mean by "unenforcable". None of these 
restrictions are "enforcable".

Also, it's not just <div>. <body> is also not an acceptable ancestor.

Basically, there needs to be some sort of semantic involved, at the very 
least a paragraph. Otherwise you just have a hotch-potch of inline 
elements separated by effectively nothing.

The restriction here is the same as the restriction in HTML4 Strict (vs 
Transitional) that says that you can't have inline elements inside <body>. 
Unfortunately HTML4 strict does allow mixed content in <div>, so you get 
people doing this:

   ...
   <body>
    <div class="header">
     My Hedgehogs
    </div>
    <div class="content">
     Bla bla bla...
    </div>
   </body>

...which is just as bad as <font> tags and <br> elements (arguably it's 
worse, in fact).

This will be more clearly non-conformant in WA1 (if still valid) once I 
get around to fleshing out WA1 section 2.

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