[whatwg] text/html flavor conformance checkers and <foo />

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> >
> > What should text/html flavor conformance checkers say about <foo />?
> > 
> > Silently treat as <foo>> as per SGML?
> 
> Yes.

No, that wouldn't be compatible with legacy browsers and would break 
millions if not billions of documents.

(Consider:

   <a href=http://example.com/> Hello </a>


> > Silently treat as <foo> as per real world?
> 
> Intentionally buggy/broken behaviour should not be carried over into 
> conformance checkers.

I agree it shouldn't be silent.


> > Report a warning?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > Report an error?
> 
> I don't think it should be an error.  A warning like the WDG validator 
> issues is appropriate.

I don't understand the difference between "warning" and "error".


> > What about <foo/>?
> 
> Same as <foo />.

Agreed, although in the spec they trigger from different places (the 
space causes the UA to switch from tagname parsing to attribute parsing). 


On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Jonny Axelsson wrote:
> 
> HTML never became a SGML application, and though SGML was believed to be 
> on the verge of taking over the world in the middle nineties that never 
> happened. There is no benefit in my opinion for a modern spec to include 
> counter-intuitive SGML features that made sense at the time (or rather 
> in a SGML universe). Neither would SGML dependency be desireable.

Agreed.


On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Brad Neuberg wrote:
> 
> +1.  When will people stop pretending that HTML is not SGML (it's also 
> not currently XML)?

Done.


On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, R.J.Koppes wrote:
>
> I'd say the "/" in <foo /> should be treated as an invalid character by 
> conformance checkers, I guess something like <foo ?> is treated that way 
> too? If not it should. So it might raise an error reporting an illegal 
> character and it might raise another error in a further stage if the 
> </foo> closing tag is mandatory (in the case of <script> for instance)

<foo ?> actually would be treated, according to the spec, as

   <foo ?="">

The "/" character is treated more like a space than other characters.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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