Anne van Kesteren

Appeasing the markup gods

The following is what follows from design by community: Then, if the element is one of the void elements, then there may be a single U+002F SOLIDUS character. This character has no effect except to appease the markup gods. As this character is therefore just a symbol of faith, atheists should omit it. Converting Wordpress into generating HTML documents just became easier. Silly people. However, given that the editor has a sense of humor, as quoted above, I think I’m sort of fine with it.

Comments

  1. I hope that comment makes it into the spec.

    Posted by Jeff Cutsinger at

  2. Now actually, that *is* a good idea :). Get rid of those complaining about XHTML not being correct HTML for once and for all.

    ~Grauw

    Posted by Laurens Holst at

  3. So the solution to people using XHTML as HTML is to change HTML to look like XHTML? Seems kind of backwards if you ask me, but I guess in the long run it might be better.

    Posted by Tom-Eric Gerritsen at

  4. Goed idee.

    Posted by Dean Edwards at

  5. This isn't design-by-committee. There were no votes, and I made the final decision on my own. This was an example of the system working -- feedback from a large part of the community being overwhelmingly in favour of a feature, with few arguments against. If the WHATWG ignored feedback, there wouldn't be much point in it existing.

    Posted by Ian Hickson at

  6. Ian, I said “community” not “committee.” (Meant as an inside joke.)

    Posted by Anne van Kesteren at

  7. Get rid of those complaining about XHTML not being correct HTML for once and for all.

    Laurens, XHTML is not correct HTML. It never has been and never will be. They are significantly different in so many ways, the fact that they look similar on the surface is irrelevant. With this and the latest change, there is still only a tiny subset of XHTML that can be considered valid in HTML

    But this was just the first step. Now we allow the utterly useless xmlns attribute on the html element in HTML, and they're starting to push hard for XML Data Island and Custom Tag-like features (as implemented by IE) for embedding XML directly into HTML.

    That's like the kind of nonsense we got from the XForms community, which we resisted then. I'm becoming increasingly disturbed by the outcome and I'm finding it hard to see where it will all end.

    Posted by Lachlan Hunt at