[whatwg] Empty elements

[Tim Altman]

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:49:15 +0100, Lachlan Hunt  
<lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> wrote:

> 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.

Gah!  Of course.  Thank you. :)

>>> 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.

Got it.

-- 
Tim Altman