Ian Hickson wrote:
You may notice that very few elements and attributes in HTML5 at the moment are required. This is not entirely coincidental.
I think I know what you are getting at: You want to eradicate invalid HTML on the web, by declaring everything to be valid!
From the perspective of a browser vendor, its not really important whether some input is conformant or not, the browser need to handle it as gracefully as possible anyway, and users want browsers to be compatible regardless of whether the html is valid or not ("bug-for-bug compatibility").
But the notion of conformance is still quite useful to authors and authoring tools. E.g. if a META-element without any attributes appears in a document, its clearly due to an oversight or a bug in some tool, so it would be useful to have a conformance checker or authoring tool flag this, even if a browsers will handle it somewhat gracefully (by ignoring it).
regards Olav Junker Kjær
