[whatwg] The problems with namespaces in text/html

Sun Nov 5 06:08:09 PST 2006

On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 14:57:08 +0100, Elliotte Harold  
<elharo at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
> Is there anything else that stops every HTML5 document from being a  
> well-formed XML document?

Well, the problem is that they would mean different things. Consider the  
following fragment:

   <p>
    <table>
     ...
    </table>
   <p>

In a tree, that would look like:

   p
   table

And not, as you might expect:

   p
     table

This problem is actually as simple as:

   <!doctype html><foo/>

I suppose there is some subset of HTML5 documents that would mean the same  
when processed with an XML processor... I don't really see any value in  
imposing restrictions on all HTML5 documents to conform to such a subset  
though. Especially as you have to support a much wider variety of  
documents anyway.

-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>