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Posted by Harlan Messinger on 06/20/21 12:01
Jeff wrote:
> 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.
Well, yeah, if you were writing for user agents that followed this
treatment correctly, and you wanted the equivalent of
<p>The / is called a "slash"</p>
you would need to escape it when writing it in this form:
<p/The / is called a "slash"/
>>
>> 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
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