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

[Thomas Broyer]

2006/11/30, Hallvord R M Steen:
> > Well, nothing per the parsing section causes "ambiguities in DOM parsing"
> > (assuming I understand what that means). So I'm not sure what you're
> > suggesting.
>
> It's the core of the debate, namely if <img /> isn't technically a
> problem why are validators required to flag it as invalid? The counter
> examples are comparisons with <div /> which isn't parsed into the DOM
> most would expect when sent as HTML, and corner cases like
>
> <base href=http://example.org/bar/>
>
> - now, how do you resolve relative URLs in this document? This is the
> sort of ambiguity the DOM parsing has to take into account - caused by
> the usage of forward closing slashes within tags. If the spec can
> specify simple non-ambiguous ways of parsing that like the author
> expects I think we can relax validation requirements like Sam wants.

How about: a slash is ignored in the start tag of a void element if it
appears just before the closing > and it unambiguously is not part of
an attribute value.
 - <br/> => no attribute, ignored
 - <base href="http://example.org/bar"/> => after the closing quote, ignored
 - <base href=http://example.org/bar /> => preceded by a space, so its
not part of the attribute value => ignored
 - <base href=http://example.org/bar/> => could be part of the
attribute value, so treated as *being* part of it

-- 
Thomas Broyer