[whatwg] 9.1.2.1: trailing slash and atheism

[Elliotte Harold]

9.1.2.1 states:

Then, if the element is one of the void elements, then there may be a 
single U+002F SOLIDUS character. This character has no effect except to 
appease the markup gods. As this character is therefore just a symbol of 
faith, atheists should omit it.

The second sentence is false, and also likely to cause unnecessary 
conflict with fundamentalists who don't understand markup and don't get 
the joke. But mostly it's false. I suggest rewriting as follows:

This character has no effect when the document is parsed by an HTML5 
parser. However, if the document when parsed by an XML parser, the 
trailing slash converts the tag into an empty-element tag, and thereby 
makes an otherwise malformed element well-formed.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
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