[whatwg] Handling in the "after head" insertion mode

Thu Dec 4 03:17:39 PST 2008

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:51:05 +0100, timeless <timeless at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 12:34 PM, Tommy Thorsen <tommy at kvaleberg.com> 
>> wrote:
>>> This matches Internet Explorer and Opera, but not Firefox and 
>>> Safari. Then
>>> again, it looks like Firefox and Safari ignore all </br> tags.
>>
>> if we're both able to get away with ignoring all </br> tags, wouldn't
>> the ideal forward path be to make always ignored?
>
> Firefox and Safari do not ignore it in quirks mode. I rather keep the 
> amount of differences between quirks and standards mode to a minimum 
> (by doing what Opera and Internet Explorer do) than increase it.
>

Aha, I hadn't even thought about quirks vs. non-quirks. I definitely 
agree that keeping the differences to a minimum is a good thing.

Also, it's not like the specified parsing algorithm ignores 
completely. All the insertion modes from "before html" to "in body" have 
special handling for it, except "after head". This makes it look more 
like someone just forgot to put that handling in "after head" than 
like a deliberate decision to ignore the .

For the record, the following markup:

<!doctype html><body></br>

results in:

<html>
    <head>
    <body>
       <br>

with the current algorithm, because the "in body" insertion mode treats 
 as if it was a .

[whatwg] Handling </br> in the "after head" insertion mode