|
|
Posted by Jeff on 10/26/51 12:01
Harlan Messinger wrote:
> 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>
Hmm, that's pretty wild but I think I've seen something like that in
xml/xslt.
What happens if you have the space before the slash? Does SGML ignore
whitespace there? I know an earlier version of NS needed the whitespace.
>
> 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.
So, this:
<p />does this/
<p>does this</p>
That implies to me that / should join the list of entities that should
be escaped as "<" and "&" are.
>
> 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.
Well, I realize that <br /> is not valid in html 4. From what I can tell
it is required in xhtml, which I have no desire to use since it gives me
nothing tangible over html, but what I was thinking was whether this is
going to be needed in html 5 which will get here someday. Or not.
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.
On a side note, I notice an ever increasing number of pages with an
xhtml doctype.
Jeff
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|