Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 03/12/07 07:34

Scripsit Steven Saunderson:

>> <table/<tr><td>/
>
> I am trying to understand this slightly esoteric syntax (it appeared
> recently in a thread about <p>s).

It's a funny game, but just a game of course. Actually we can make the table
at least one character smaller:
<table/<tr<td>/

> Does the first '/' close the tag and the second '/' close the element
> ?

Yes, you can put it that way.

> Can you tell me where it mentions this in the HTML 4.01 spec ?

Normatively, at 4.1 ("An HTML document is an SGML document - -") and in
section 20, "SGML Declaration of HTML 4", when it says SHORTTAG YES.

Informally, in the messy appendix B:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.3
(which effectively says "we know wowsers don't grok this, but we were told
to continue pretending that we define HTML as an SGML application").

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Back to original message]