Re: [Lynx-dev] A patch for lynx.

[Walter Ian Kaye]

At 07:32 p -0400 04/19/2007, Zephaniah E. Hull didst inscribe upon an 
electronic papyrus:

> On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 10:15:31PM +0100, David Woolley wrote:
> >  Zephaniah E. Hull wrote:
> >
> >  >of '<tag some_attributes />', which means fairly exactly
> >  >'<tag some_attributes></tag>'.
> >
> >  No it doesn't.  In XHTML 1.0 written in *Non*-HTML compatible
> >  mode it has this meaning.  In HTML it has had a de facto meaning
> >  of simply <tag some_attributes>.
>
> To verify here, is the / actually legal in any version of HTML or XHTML
> that does not consider this a closing statement?
>
> If so, does it actually have any _meaning_?
>
> If the answer is no to either of these, then I simply _can't_ see this
> as a valid reason not to parse this as stated above.

Because if an element requires an end tag then it requires an end 
tag, regardless of whether or not the start tag has a [garbage] "/" 
in it. HTML is not XHTML, and does not pretend to be. It's the other 
way around: XHTML pretends to be HTML.

> Especially in a browser that has lynx's handling of <tag/foo/>.
>
> (Try it if you never have, then come back with an explination of why we
> should support that and _not_ support a usage that's not all that
> uncommon in the wild.)

I think that has nothing to do with end tags in HTML.


At 07:25 a +0100 04/20/2007, David Woolley didst inscribe:
> As a first thing, one should do a much more careful bugwise 
> compatibility reverse engineering job to see whether, for
> example, a missing </script> is handled correctly even when
> <script src=.... /> is not used.

Exactly. :-)


-boo
who prefers well-formed HTML over any formedness of xhtml