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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Nov 30, 2006, at 00:18, James Graham wrote:

> I tentatively support the idea that trailing slashes on  
> "singleton"[1] elements should not be a parse error.

Me, too, and I'm past the tentative phase.

> I don't think it has any actual technical merit

OTOH, the blog.whatwg.org WordPress lipsticking drill was a total  
waste of time from a technical point of view. It was purely about  
public relations and politics.

> but I think it will be helpful in getting developer mindshare; a  
> lot of people have drunk the "Zeldman Koolaid" and have the ideas  
> of XHTML, clean markup, CSS, and conformance to standards in  
> general all mushed together in their brain[2]. For these people  
> (who I think represent the upper quartile of web developers in  
> terms of commitment to good markup) the trailing slash in empty  
> elements is the syntax of a new generation - it is a symbol that  
> represents everything that has changed in web design since 1996 -  
> as intrinsically useless as a fashionable designer label but just  
> as seductive.

+1

Propaganda efforts are better directed at other issues than undoing  
the Zeldmanian />.

> [1] I find that name quite confusing as it suggests there should  
> only be one in the entire document.

They are void elements now.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/