[whatwg] WA1: <meta> attribute requirements

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
>
> I think I know what you are getting at: You want to eradicate invalid 
> HTML on the web, by declaring everything to be valid!

Hehe.


> 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).

I agree that we need to make conformance checking useful, of course. I 
disagree that a blank <meta/> is necessarily a problem. Maybe the author 
wanted to add some attributes dynamically later. Maybe he wants the DOM of 
all his pages to be equivalent and at that point in his pages there simply 
is no metadata to give.

The difficulty is in walking the fine line between useful and 
over-constrained. For example, the fact that <ol></ol> is invalid in HTML4 
is a real problem.

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