What about '<foo />' with a space between 'o' and '/' ? There are many "legacy" pages with that kind of mark-up on <br> elements and so forth.
On 2/15/06, Lachlan Hunt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Tim Altman wrote: > > On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 23:48:57 +0100, Ian Hickson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Tim Altman wrote: > >>> > >>> May OBJECT and CANVAS be treated as empty elements, i.e. <canvas /> and > >>> <object /> if there is no fallback content? > >> > >> I don't understand your question. > > > > Let me rephrase: Is it valid for the object and canvas elements use the > > empty element syntax? > > HTML: No, XHTML: Yes. > > >> If you mean "Can the string '<object/>' be treated as an empty element > >> tag", the answer is no. > > > > You seem to have answered my question here. Why not? > > Because it is XML syntax, not HTML syntax. > > According SGML rules, <foo/> has a different meaning from the same > syntax in XML. According to the new HTML5 parsing rules (due to > complete lack of support for SGML), the '/' is an easy parse error and > is essentially ignored. Backwards compatibility reasons prevent the XML > meaning from being retrofitted into HTML. > > -- > Lachlan Hunt > http://lachy.id.au/ > >