Re: An HTML Announcement of perl-5.12.0 on The Perl Foundation Blog

On 04/25/2010 04:44 PM, Eric Brine wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Mark Mielke <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>     Closing tags gives the processor more explicit instructions on how
>     to deal with ambiguities
>
>
> There are no ambiguities in valid HTML.

There are no ambiguities in any language, but we still use () to help 
the people who are trying to read it, and if it is *not* valid HTML, 
having the explicit instructions certainly makes it easier to debug...

>     The combined open close tags such as <hr/> should be used with a
>     space before the / to make sure it works on old and new browsers.
>
>     Try: <hr />
>
>
> That's not valid HTML.

What is invalid about it? The "/" gets interpretted as an unrecognized 
attribute. Do you mean formal HTML without support for extensions via 
new attributes? Which HTML or XHTML parsers do you know that will break 
with <hr />?

>     Again, it's just a good practice.
>
>
> No, using invalid HTML is not good practice. There's no reason to do 
> it, and the only possibly effect is to create errors.
>
> If you're writing HTML, write HTML.
> If you're writing XHTML, write XHTML.
>

This is a matter of interpretation. I don't see any problem with writing 
code that is both valid XHTML and valid HTML. But if you don't, I won't 
try to further convince you...

Cheers,
mark