Re: no-margin settings and validation

At 10:49 20/05/02 -0400, cbirds(at)earthlink.net wrote:
>I am not sure I understand what you are demo'ing there....
>Can you explain why you are not closing  or opening your tags with the >
>or < ?

:-)

Because I can...

>Or are you just saying that these mistakes will validate and work in
>newer browsers but not in old?

They aren't mistakes.

In SGML there are various other ways of writing tags, and HTML explicitly 
allows some SHORTTAG constructs (see 
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.7 ). This can confuse 
people quite easily. In fact, every month or so someone posts to the W3 
Validator list complaining that the W3 validator allows "<strong<a href="foo">.

I don't know of any browser that can display SHORTTAGed pages correctly, 
although I'm told EmacsW3 can. The trouble with SHORTTAGs is they make the 
HTML much more difficult to parse. XHTML doesn't allow SHORTTAGS which is 
one of the things that makes it easier to process (and debug).

One of the reasons[1] why I find SHORTTAGs interesting is because, back 
when I was a newbie to HTML I found myself wanting to type things like 
<.strong>Text</> because </> seemed (and is) unambiguous - close the 
current element. Remember, never use SHORTTAGs in any actual real pages: 
they generally don't work.

Andrew

--
http://aamcf.co.uk/

[1] Apart from peverseness :-)

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