> > On 07/10/2004, at 10:07 AM, Geoff Deering wrote: > > The reason being that if you are not closing all your tags it > > can become a guessing game for the parser where the CSS declaration > > may end > > in various parts of the document. > > > > It always strikes me that when using HTML4 you are at the mercy of the > > arbitoriness of the parser. > > There is nothing to stop us writing "well-formed" HTML. Elements which > have optional closing tags are just that - optional.
I agree with everything you have said, but.. in complex designs, take out the end tags and that's exactly what you leave the parser to do... guess. Are there any parsers out there you explicitly trust to get it right every time? I don't. They may well do, but they are still guessing if there are no end tags. I'm much more happy to explicitly declare my design than have parsers guessing at what I've designed, the performance trade off is not so great. Now go into the area of accessibility, how are you going to tell all sorts of user agents and devices the full semantic meaning of the markup. What about when aural.css becomes mature? Will complex document in HTML4 be as exact as those following XML syntax? In my view, you cannot fully mark up documents with a trusted explicit semantic fullness without and XML definition. The border here might be small, but it's small enough for one definition to allow for best of interpretation and the other an explicit interpretation. ------------- Geoff Deering ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
