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

[Leons Petrazickis]

On 11/29/06, Robert Sayre <sayrer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/29/06, Robert Sayre <sayrer at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Ok, I have submitted a bug report.
> >
> > http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3406
> >
> > Let's see what happens.
>
> Well, that didn't seem too effective. :/

This rigmarole is going to repeat on every site that has converted to
XHTML sent as text/html. People are emotionally invested in the idea
of trailing slashes. Websites have complex codebases, and going
through them removing trailing slashes on singleton elements would be
very hard.

They've already reaped all the benefits of XHTML -- cleaner, more
readable, more maintainable code. There's no incentive for them to
agree with you. This is a minor point that we need to give to them.

The very idea of HTML5 is to not demand that the Web be scrapped and
rewritten. We need the people who have rewritten all their pages so
that they validate on the W3C validator -- they have the fire and the
zeal and the will to spread our format. We need to make the migration
from invalid XHTML to valid HTML5 very, very easy for them. We can't
require them to dig through PHP spaghetti. And that means that, no
matter how it's achieved, <br/> needs to be valid HTML5.
--
Leons Petrazickis