[whatwg] Empty elements

[Lachlan Hunt]

Tim Altman wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 23:48:57 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Tim Altman wrote:
>>>
>>> May OBJECT and CANVAS be treated as empty elements, i.e. <canvas /> and
>>> <object /> if there is no fallback content?
>>
>> I don't understand your question.
> 
> Let me rephrase: Is it valid for the object and canvas elements use the 
> empty element syntax?

HTML: No, XHTML: Yes.

>> If you mean "Can the string '<object/>' be treated as an empty element
>> tag", the answer is no.
> 
> You seem to have answered my question here.  Why not?

Because it is XML syntax, not HTML syntax.

According SGML rules, <foo/> has a different meaning from the same 
syntax in XML.  According to the new HTML5 parsing rules (due to 
complete lack of support for SGML), the '/' is an easy parse error and 
is essentially ignored.  Backwards compatibility reasons prevent the XML 
meaning from being retrofitted into HTML.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/