Re: to </p> or not to </p>

Jacob Kjome <[email protected]> writes:
> I'm wondering what peoples' thoughts are about DOM serialization and 
> dealing with <p> elements.  Currently, XMLC treats the <p> tag specially, 
> classifying it as a tag that shouldn't have an end tag written for 
> it..  This seems to have been an arbitrary preference of early developers 
> of XMLC.  

I can't really remember why this was done.  I think it's the only tag were the
the close tag is optional that is included in the NO_CLOSE_TAGS list.

> So, does anyone have a problem with modifying XMLC to force <p> tags to be 
> ended with </p>?  Obviously, either form is legal HTML4.01, but ending <p> 
> tags with </p> seems like the more correct thing to do and matches up with 

I think the only thing that can be argued here is that it's more consistent
with the rest of the formatting.  Since minimization is a part of HTML,
neither form is really more correct.

> the the next wave of HTML which is XHTML.  People really should get used to 
> this at this point, but I'm asking for opinions here because I don't want 
> to break everyone's layouts unnecessarily.

Personally, I don't see this as an advantage, since XHTML and HTML still
have fundamentally different formatting.  It's really deceptive to
imply otherwise.  I would rather educate people on the differences
(and why this is a good motivation to use XHTML).

I think it really comes down to aesthetics and consistent behavior of the
formatter vs a small chance of irritating a buggy browser. Not sure it's
really worth the trouble, but then I often do somewhat risky things 
in the name of consistency.

Mark