Re: [xml-dev] MicroXML

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:27 AM, James Clark <jjc@jclark.com> wrote:

  We have two distinct cases:

(a) Allowing something like <br></br>

(b) Allowing something like <a/>

For (a), wouldn't existing parsers simply ignore the end-tag?

It turns out that they do not.  HTML5 says that the error recovery for

<br></br>

is to treat it as

<br><br>

(I find this bizarre in the extreme.) The spec is hard to read but you can see it in

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/tokenization.html#parsing-main-inbody

An end tag whose tag name is "br"

Parse error. Act as if a start tag token with the tag name "br" had been seen. Ignore the end tag token.

There is a handy tool for seeing how the HTML5 spec recovers from errors:

http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/

James