Re: [PATCH] export to various flavors of (X)HTML

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Rick Frankel <rick@rickster.com> writes:

> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:59:32AM +0800, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>> 
>> The " />" style doesn't validate for html4, that's what I was going on.
>> It certainly doesn't make my browser explode, but I wanted that little
>> green checkmark! If we can live with that, that's fine, or I can try to
>> come up with a less hacky way of handling closing tags -- a macro
>> maybe.
>
> It should validate. According to the w3c compatibility guidelines
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/guidelines.html):
>
> C.2. Empty Elements
>
> Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements,
> e.g. <br />, <hr /> and <img src="karen.jpg" alt="Karen" />. 
> Also, use the minimized tag syntax for empty elements, e.g. <br />, 
> as the alternative syntax <br></br> allowed by XML gives uncertain 
> results in many existing user agents.
>
> C.3. Element Minimization and Empty Element Content
>
> Given an empty instance of an element whose content model is not EMPTY
> (for example, an empty title or paragraph) do not use the minimized 
> form (e.g. use <p> </p> and not <p />).

Right, but as the note at the top of that page says:

"This appendix summarizes design guidelines for authors who wish their
XHTML documents to render on existing HTML user agents."

I read that as just a better statement of what I was trying to say
earlier: self-closing tags will render in HTML4, but they're not
_strictly correct_ HTML4.

Try the validation link at the bottom of this page:

http://ericabrahamsen.net/html4test.html

It's not a disaster.

I'm happy to do whatever needs to be done with the patch, whether that
means dropping the closing-tags fix, re-implementing it, or whatever. It
would be good to hear other HTML-users' opinions on this, if anyone has
one!

E

>> The xmns declaration, on the other hand, seems quite meaningless for
>> anything that isn't xhtml (even if it doesn't actually break), and it's
>> only a couple of lines of code to deal with, I'd rather keep that in
>> there...
>
> fair enough.
>
> rick