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

[Sam Ruby]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:10:10 +0100, Robert Sayre <sayrer at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Perhaps it would be better to prove that the current rules result in
>> easy explanations. What would the text of a bug filed on WordPress
>> look like? Let's assume you actually want them to fix it, not just
>> make a point.
> 
> The bug would request that Wordpress doesn't try to output XML for the 
> text/html media type. That seems to be the problem here.

If the code for Wordpress fit on a page, that suggestion would be easy 
to implement.

As it stands now, it appear that several hundred lines of code would 
need to change.  And in each case, the code would need to be aware of 
the content type in effect.  In some cases, that information may not be 
available.  In fact, that may not have been determined yet.

One way cross-cutting concerns such as this one are often handled is to 
simple capture the output and post-process it.  Latchlan opted to do so 
with the WHATWG Blog.  The first pass for things like this generally 
takes the form of simple pattern matching and regular expressions.

Often this evolves.  What would be better is something that could take 
that string and produce a DOM, from which a correct serialization can 
take place.

Now, what type of parser would you use?  HTML5's rules come 
tantalizingly close to handling this situation, except for a few cases 
involving tags that are self-closing...

- Sam Ruby