[whatwg] WA1: <meta> attribute requirements

Olav Junker Kjær olav at olav.dk
Tue Jul 19 06:35:01 PDT 2005


Ian Hickson wrote:
> You may notice that very few elements and attributes in HTML5 at the 
> moment are required. This is not entirely coincidental.

I think I know what you are getting at: You want to eradicate invalid 
HTML on the web, by declaring everything to be valid!

 From the perspective of a browser vendor, its not really important 
whether some input is conformant or not, the browser need to handle it 
as gracefully as possible anyway, and users want browsers to be 
compatible regardless of whether the html is valid or not ("bug-for-bug 
compatibility").

But the notion of conformance is still quite useful to authors and 
authoring tools. E.g. if a META-element without any attributes appears 
in a document, its clearly due to an oversight or a bug in some tool, so 
it would be useful to have a conformance checker or authoring tool flag 
this, even if a browsers will handle it somewhat gracefully (by ignoring 
it).

regards
Olav Junker Kjær



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