Matej Knopp wrote:
Hi,
I noticed that if you add empty <div /> tags to firefox, it treats it
like if you forgot to close it.
There seem to be some misconceptions about what <div /> means in this
thread.
It is true that in XML <div></div and <div/> are equivalent. However
XHTML (at least 1.0) has some additional rules you have to take into
account.
In this case the next rule applies:
"For non-empty elements, end tags are required"
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.3
Note that an element that is allowed to have a child node is always a
non-empty element, even if this specific element instance has no content.
Therefore <div/> is invalid XHTML
Of course this all has to do with backward compatibility for browsers,
so that browsers don't have to care whether they are served XHTML 1.0 or
HTML 4.01. They can still use the same parser and use their error
recovery to create the same DOM.
In my opinion Wicket does not need to correct any of these "user
errors", including the invalid <span wicket:id="x"/>. It just creates
more confusion than it fixes.
However what would be nice is if you could choose to let Wicket use a
XML parser for selected templates. This can give at least two
advantages. Less chance of user errors when writing the templates, and
you can choose the output mode independent of the input. So you can
easily switch between HTML, XHTML and XML output. A few years ago I
tried to do this with Xalan, however the XHTML output still created
invalid XHTML. Since creating valid XHTML was not a requirement for a
valid XSLT processor nobody was worried about this, and I never got
around to fix it myself. But it cannot be hard to do.
Robert
