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

Wed Nov 29 08:21:19 PST 2006

Stewart Brodie wrote:
> "Robert Sayre" <sayrer at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Better? This is an opinion, and it's not backed up by data. So far, it
>> looks like Sam has the data on his side. People do it, and it tends to
>> work interoperably.

Let me emphasize two words in Roberts snippet above: SO FAR.

I encourage everybody to show me the data.

> Except when it doesn't.
> 
> For example, here's a fragment of hotmail.com's signup page, served as
> "text/html".  It's the only example I've come across to date:
> 
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0
>   Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
> ...
> <select id="iRegion" name="pff00000000010004" />
>   <script>...</script>
> </select>
> ...

The only example to date, and not one that matches my criteria, which I 
will now restate with portions emphasized:

     In HTML5, there are a number of elements with a content model of
     empty: area, base, br, col, command, embed, hr, img, link, meta,
     and param.

     If HTML5 were changed so that these elements -- AND THESE ELEMENTS
     ALONE -- permitted an optional trailing slash character, what
     percentage of the web would be parsed differently?  Can you cite
     three independent examples of existing websites where the parsing
     would diverge?

- Sam Ruby