[whatwg] W3C compatibility

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Julian Reschke wrote:
> Where did the IETF suggest that...? Pointer appreciated.

Well, W3C and IETF. It's in the IANA registration for text/html (RFC
2854). Strictly speaking it's informational.

"Due to the long and distributed development of HTML, current practice
on the Internet includes a wide variety of HTML variants. Implementors
of text/html interpreters must be prepared to be "bug-compatible" with
popular browsers in order to work with many HTML documents available the
Internet."

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2854.txt

Typical browsers can mangle XHTML 1.0 as text/html only because of a bug
in their HTML handling of null end tags which causes them to understand
<br /> as <br>, rather than <br>> .

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis