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

[Steve Runyon]

Sorry for being the dunce here, but is anybody saying otherwise?  Whereas
XML _requires_ that you close every tag, HTML5 _should allow_ you to close
any tag.  I agree with what was said previously about considering something
like '<select /></select>' invalid, but if somebody's suggesting that
something like '<img src="..." />' or '<br />' should also be invalid,
I disagree.  Validators and UAs should accept singleton tags _with or
without_ the self-closer.

Am I totally misunderstanding or missing the point here?


On 11/29/06, Leons Petrazickis <leons.petrazickis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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