Migrating to XHTML: empty elements

[Mark]

(I'm new to these groups, so I'm not sure which one to use ...)

XHTML has been emabled in virtually all modern browsers. So is there any
more need for the space before the closing tags in empty elements?

The following seems to work for me in the browser's I've got:

<br/>

I no longer have IE 5, but do a significant enough number of users still
have the old browsers?

Mark

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Re: Migrating to XHTML: empty elements

Mark <mark@manngo.ne t.example.net> wrote:
[color=blue]
> (I'm new to these groups, so I'm not sure which one to use ...)[/color]

Then it's generally best to study the situation until you know the
_right_ group. The choice between comp.* and alt.* is yours of course;
usually selecting either is better than selecting both.
[color=blue]
> XHTML has been emabled in virtually all modern browsers.[/color]

I guess so, assuming that "emabled" means "screwed up" or something
like that. Try sending XHTML the right way to IE 6, and it will choke
up (well, just ask the user where to save the data).
[color=blue]
> So is
> there any more need for the space before the closing tags in empty
> elements?[/color]

Huh? An element has at most one closing tag.
[color=blue]
> The following seems to work for me in the browser's I've got:
>
> <br/>[/color]

It works on IE only because IE knows neither "old" HTML nor XHTML.
It won't work by XHTML rules, whatever you do. It secretly slurps tag
soup in its old way, ignoring the slash because it does _not_ parse
"old" HTML correctly.

If you are confused, the ultimate reason is XHTML. Forget that you ever
heard of it; ignore it as marketese, academese, or nerdese. Later if
you'll find yourself in a situation where you need to and you can
combine HTML-like markup with XML markup, or utilize generic XML tools
for your HTML, _then_ it's time to learn XHTML.

Any XHTML specification or tutorial should really contain the note
"Kids, don't do this on the WWW (yet)".

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html