Make --html4tags the default?

[Shawn Medero]

On 5/2/07, Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:


> Am Donnerstag, 03. Mai 2007 schrieb Milian Wolff:

> > Validate the following document:

> > http://milianw.de/misc/empty_tags.html

>

> Woha, just pushed it through validome and it says indeed that the trailing

> slashes are not allowed in html!

> Now I'm speechless!


Because HTML is not XML and XHTML (XML) is not HTML. :)

[Tim Berners-Lee based a fair bit HTML's syntax on SGML][1]. SGML and
XML don't have the same notion of empty tags.

Now can you imagine if all web browsers displayed a parsing error
instead of your rendered HTML document because people (or software)
put a trailing slash on <br> tags by honest mistake? This is one
reason why the debate rages on concerning display of XHTML documents
as application/xhtml+xml.

-s

[1]: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/thesis/html5-conformance-checker.xhtml#history