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Bug 12817 - The hr element (and others) Compliments for a great piece of work. However, one issue threatens to undermine the future of HTML5: wellformedness is not required. This may generally lead to ambiguity (did the author intentionally omit the closing tag?) and
Summary: The hr element (and others) Compliments for a great piece of work. However, o...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-05-30 09:51 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:36 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-05-30 09:51:20 UTC 
Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110525/
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#top

Comment:
The hr element (and others)

Compliments for a great piece of work. However, one issue threatens to
undermine the future of HTML5: wellformedness is not required. This may
generally lead to ambiguity (did the author intentionally omit the closing
tag?) and slower parsing (larger context required). It would be a missed
opportunity if HTML5 would not meet this generic XML requirement. Meanwhile,
the whole professional world has learned to <hr /> and <br />. Please consider
abandoning this "feature".


Posted from: 84.87.120.148
User agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; MS-RTC LM 8)
Comment 1 Ms2ger 2011-05-30 10:25:52 UTC 
(In reply to comment #0)
> Compliments for a great piece of work. However, one issue threatens to
> undermine the future of HTML5: wellformedness is not required. This may
> generally lead to ambiguity (did the author intentionally omit the closing
> tag?) and slower parsing (larger context required). It would be a missed
> opportunity if HTML5 would not meet this generic XML requirement. Meanwhile,
> the whole professional world has learned to <hr /> and <br />. Please consider
> abandoning this "feature".

I believe Mark Pilgrim would translate this into English as "I am as high as a kite".
Comment 2 Aryeh Gregor 2011-05-30 22:30:43 UTC 
(In reply to comment #0)
> Compliments for a great piece of work. However, one issue threatens to
> undermine the future of HTML5: wellformedness is not required.

This has not been an impediment to HTML adoption in the 20 years since it was first created.  In contrast, XHTML tried to solve the well-formedness problem and failed miserably.  So the evidence is squarely in the opposite direction: requiring well-formedness would destroy the future of HTML.

> This may
> generally lead to ambiguity (did the author intentionally omit the closing
> tag?)

The spec generally makes markup invalid in cases where the author's intent is unclear, and only allows closing tags to be omitted in cases where the intent is clear.  If there are specific cases where the spec allows markup that you think might indicate authoring error, I suggest you file bugs on those specific cases.

> and slower parsing (larger context required).

Empirical evidence suggests that parsing HTML is not much slower than parsing XML: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/cost-of-html/

> It would be a missed
> opportunity if HTML5 would not meet this generic XML requirement.

XHTML attempted to require XML well-formedness, and was a disastrous failure.  Trying to go back to XHTML when it had ten years to succeed and did not is not much of a missed opportunity.

But fortunately for you, HTML5 does support an XML serialization, XHTML5.  You are free to write and serve your own pages as well-formed XML if you so choose.  HTML5 is not going to require that everyone do this, however.
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-06-21 07:33:24 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Conformance to precise syntax rules _is_ required. I'm not sure what you mean by "wellformedness" outside of an XML context.
Comment 4 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:36:20 UTC 
mass-move component to LC1