[whatwg] Allow trailing slash in always-empty HTML5 elements?

[Mike Schinkel]

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> HTML and XML have significantly different parsing requirements 
>> and they absolutely must be treated as significantly different 
>> file formats.  Any attempt to treat them as the same format is 
>> an extremely bad idea.
>> ...
>> This is why the spec is defined in terms of the DOM, so that 
>> there can be both HTML and XHTML serialisations of the same 
>> document, rather than defining that both serialisations are the 
>> same syntax.

But please take into consideration that almost nobody writes web pages using
a DOM; they write web pages using text editors and dynamically using string
concatonation. As such there is great value for users in having them be as
similar as possible. If they converge, it will accelerate chaos on the web.

-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org/