[whatwg] 'Main Part of the Content' Idiom

Fri Jun 4 13:16:38 PDT 2010

On 2010-06-04 22:03, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Roger Hågensen<rescator at emsai.net>  wrote:
>> ...
>> As you can see the aside is outside the body, all latest browsers seem to
>> handle this pretty fine.
>> http://validator.w3.org/ on the other hand gives the error " Line 12, Column
>> 6: body start tag found but the body element is already open.<body>"
>>
>> Now, either that is a bug in the validator, or the body is automatic.
>> And sure enough, removing the<body>  and</body>  tags the document
>> validates, and none of the browsers behave differently at all.
>> Is the body tag optional or could even be redundant in HTML5 ?
> <body>  is optional.  It automatically gets added as soon as the parser
> sees an element that doesn't belong in the<head>.  (The<head>  is
> optional too, as is the<html>.)  So the<aside>  triggers a<body>
> element to be created and opened, and then later explicit<body>  tags
> get dropped.
>> I don't mind really, as currently I only use body to put all the "other"
>> tags inside, so not having to use the body tag at all would be welcome,
>> though I suspect a lot of legacy things rely on the body tag.
> No browser depends on you using the<body>  element explicitly.  It's
> perfectly fine to write your document like this:
>
> <!doctype html>
> <title>Test</title>
> <style>
>    aside {border:1px solid #bf0000;white-space:nowrap;}
> </style>
> <aside>
>    Just testing aside outside body!
> </aside>
> <article>
>    Main part of article.
> </article>
>
> The<title>  and<style>  get auto-wrapped in a<head>, the<aside>  and
> <article>  get auto-wrapped in a<body>, and the whole thing below the
> doctype gets auto-wrapped in an<html>.

Hmm! Intriguing. That is way cleaner than the "container" wrappers.
What browsers/engines behaves like that?
Does all HTML 4.01+ compliant browsers behave like this?

Roger.

-- 
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - http://EmSai.net/