Posted by frederick on 12/26/65 11:45

Bob wrote:
> frederick@southernskies.co.uk wrote:
> > David Dorward wrote:
> >> Mike Schumann wrote:
> >>
> >>> I know that <br> specifies a new line in HTML. What does <br /> do?
> >> In XHTML, it means "A line break" (i.e. the same as <br> means in HTML).
> >>
> >> In HTML, it means "A line break followed by a greater than sign", although
> >> most browsers get this wrong and treat it as "A line beak".
> >
> > I've never understood that, so perhaps today I'll try to get my head
> > around it: can you point me to the relevant reference?
>
> An isolated > sign, if you want it to appear in an HTML document, is
> written as
>
> &gt;
>
> < sign if you want to show up on web, is written as
>
> &lt;
>
> So if you want to write an HTML tutorial on a web page you write the <i>
> italic tag like this
>
> &lt;i&gt;

I'm not at all sure why you've troubled to respond to a question that I
didn't ask and already knew the answer to. I know how to code for
angle brackets as content, thanks.

My question was why, using the original example, a fully HTML-compliant
UA should interpret "<br />" as in fact being "<br> &gt;". In other
words, why shouldn't it interpret it as if it were a malformed tag,
viz. "<br/>"?

I've been assuming that the answer is in the SGML specification rather
than that for HTML?


--
AGw.

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