[whatwg] Parsing: ignore </head>?

Mon May 21 03:18:23 PDT 2007

On Mon, 21 May 2007 12:14:51 +0200, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com>  
wrote:
>> If we simply ignore </head> there's no longer a need to append elements  
>> to the head element pointer. In fact, we can remove it. I'm not sure  
>> how much this would complicate conformance checking, but it would  
>> certainly be very nice not to have such strange appending rules for the  
>> limited set of elements that have that now (<link>, <meta>, <style>,  
>> <base>).
>
> Would <body> or elements that have to be in the body but not the head  
> still implicitly close the head and open a body? In which case I'm not  
> sure all the appending rules in the spec go away.

All elements and also characters except for elements that can be in the  
head would imply a <body> start tag. However, since <link>, <meta>,  
<style>, <script>, <base> are not moved to the <head> element by IE7 and  
O9 it doesn't seem like they would need to be for compatibility with the  
web. This basically means that the "moving elements to <head>" bit in the  
specification (as implemented by Firefox and Safari I believe) can be  
removed. As a bonus this would actually simplify parsing.

-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>