Eric Abrahamsen <e...@ericabrahamsen.net> writes: > 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.
I do not understand this assertion. I thought that HTML, up to but excluding HTML5, *is* also valid SGML. If I remember well, self-closing tags date back to SGML, not requiring (but also not forbidding) an introducing space to the closing slash. SGML does allow for closing tags to be optionally omitted (and for opening tags as well) but such optional omissions have to described in the DTD. These features were all meant to favor human legibility of SGML documents, and HTML did use them a lot. These, combined with the generality of the described grammar, made generic SGML validating parsers quite difficult to write, and also, quite expensive at the time (no real problem as most SGML projects usually involved big money). XML was all of a swing in the other direction: trading human legibility in favor of much easier parsing, and was quite successful as it addressed the same problems as SGML, but in a much cheaper and democratic way. But XML (and XHTML) are not SGML anymore. And HTML5 is neither :-). François
