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

[Elliotte Harold]

Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> Because the fact is that when authors try to use XHTML as text/html, 
> they inevitibly fail to do so properly.  It takes considerable knowledge 
> and skill to be aware of and handle all issues ranging from parsing, 
> character encodings to scripts and stylesheets.

All it really takes is minimal tool support. If systems like WordPress 
and DreamWeaver that hide the HTML start generating well-formed HTML, 
that's half the battle right there.

The other half could be addressed by one little box in the corner of 
Firefox's status bar that's a smiley face if the page is valid, and a 
frown if it isn't.

Most hand authors including myself don't always achieve well-formedness 
because nothing pricks us if we don't. Even the tiniest annoyance from a 
bad page, would cause us to check the error logs and fix the problems.

It used to be that the Cafe au Lait and Cafe con Leche home pages became 
malformed on a regular basis through my carelessness or typos. That 
stopped once I implemented an XML toolchain that e-mailed me when it 
noticed a mistake on those pages. (That was actually a side effect of 
another project, not the specific intent.)

Fixing a page to be well-formed and even valid XHTML is not hard, and 
well within the abilities of most people hand authoring HTML. The 
problem is when we don't realize we have a problem in the first place. 
Once we've noticed the problem, we're 90% of the way to solving it. .

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/