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

[Shadow2531]

On 12/2/06, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> On another note, why not another new content type, one that would mean?:
>
>         "Striving to be XHTML, but if not consider me HTML5. And if that
> doesn't work, try HTML 4.01."

If you're implying, "Treat as XML and if that fails....":

One of the cool things about Opera is that if it encounters a broken
xml document, you can reparse it as HTML with a click of a link.

That means, there could be an option for browsers that support
application/xhtml+xml to treat text/html as xml ( by sniffing for a
xmlns or some other way) and then either directly or non-directly fall
back to html if there's an error.

Firefox could do the same with the yellow bar that pops up at the top
of the page that says, "The document appears to be XHTML, but is not
well formed. Firefox has reparsed it as HTML for you in an attempt to
handle the errors.", or something like that.

The problem with that would be that a lot of well-formed XHTML markup
would break if treated as XML ( because of casing rules etc.), so
you'd still want an option to reparse as HTML even if there were no
markup errors.

Sites could have a "Our pages support 'text/html as XML'  handling.
Add us to your browsers's text/html -> XML list.".

One point is that stuff like that could be done in a slick way with
the text/html type instead of a new type as we already have problems
with 2 types. (not that I believe this idea would be well accepted or
practical)

Just mentioning this though, I realize everyone's thinking, "Users
would just turn that feature off and what's the point anyway etc.???",
but I do see some benefit in the idea as a developers tool, to spread
XHTML awareness and to provide XHTML benefits with just using
text/html.

To be on topic, the other point is, that describes a (far fetched) use
case for those suggesting  *partial* integration of XML stuff in
HTML5.

-- 
burnout426