[whatwg] 9.1.2.1: trailing slash and atheism

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> > 
> > This section has nothing to do with XML. If the document was parsed by 
> > an XML parser, then there are much bigger problems afoot, such as MIME 
> > type mislabelling, or a faulty UA.
> 
> Sometimes web developers parse (non-XML) HTML with an XML parser because 
> it's the tool they have on hand.

The solution to this is to provide better tools (which is already 
happening, by the way -- if people want to join the effort, #whatwg on 
Freenode is a good place to start), not to make the language slightly more 
compatible with a fundamentally broken approach.

Some people use books as paperweights. What you are asking is equivalent 
to asking bookmakers to make their books heavier and less prone to opening 
in air currents, because then they would be better paperweights.


> If a PHP developer wants to analyse an HTML page; that developer may try 
> to use SimpleXML <http://php.net/simplexml> because that's what they 
> have on hand and know how to use.  There's no SimpleHTML available in 
> PHP.

As part of HTML5, we will have to provide these tools. Writing a spec for 
how to parse HTML was the first step.

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