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

Sat Dec 2 04:11:14 PST 2006

On Dec 2, 2006, at 14:02, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> 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.
>
> That's only true to the extent that some people seem to insist on  
> making them needlessly different. HTML is tantalizingly close to  
> well-formed XML. They both derive from SGML. They both use angle  
> bracketed tags. They both define a tree structure. Indeed in many  
> cases an HTML document is an XML document.

But the point is that the text/html processing model has to work with  
the real Web where not all documents are well-formed.

> This enables the use of the very powerful XML toolchain for  
> processing HTML.

You can use the toolchain, except for the XML processor itself, as I  
have explained before.

> What I don't understand is why some members of this working group  
> is so dead set on actively preventing HTML from being XML. The non- 
> draconian error handling I understand. But why are you disappointed  
> that <!DOCTYPE html> is well-formed XML? Why the active hostility  
> to well-formedness?

To make a conformance checker not accidentally let MIME type mistakes  
silently pass in some cases.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/