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Posted by Harlan Messinger on 09/26/09 12:01
Jeff wrote:
> Andy Dingley wrote:
>> On 28 Jan, 14:46, Jeff <jeff@spam_me_not.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't have a problem with writing HTML XHTMLish, I even like the much
>>> maligned <br />.
>>
>> Why? That's just plain wrong.
>
> Why? It's a self closing tag and it works in every browser. The trend
> is toward closing every tag you open.
In HTML, <br> is one of the tags (along with <input>, <link>, <meta:>,
and so forth) that doesn't *have* a closing tag, so it's equally
meaningless to make the opening tag a "self-closing" tag. Moreover, the
slash has another meaning in SGML (HTML is to SGML as XHTML is to XML)
as follows:
<title/My Page/
is equivalent to
<title>My Page</title>
So
<br />This sentence has a / (slash) character.
would be treated in a correctly performing HTML user agent as
<br>>This sentence has a </br> (slash) character.
which is certainly not what you want. The reason
<br />
works in real browsers is that they haven't implemented that detail of
SGML--in other words, it relies on a browser deficiency. Instead they
wind up treating the slash as something that simply doesn't belong
there, and they handle it the same way they handle anything that doesn't
belong there--they pretend it isn't there. That doesn't mean it's
valid--it isn't. It's just being ignored.
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