On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov <questpc(a)rambler.ru> wrote:
I would like to thank Roan Kattouw for helping me to
adapt my
Extension:WikiSync to use ResourceLoader. Before asking, I've spend some
hours trying to get it to work, unsuccessfully. One of key errors was
not so easy to guess: it turned out that browsers violate "self-closing"
xml tags sometimes (a tag without nested text node - with slash inside),
and it was such case with iframe.
This is why the /> syntax in text/html is stupid and harmful -- it's
just ignored by all browsers, but people assume it works. <foo> and
<foo /> parse exactly the same way in text/html and always have, the /
is ignored entirely. Elements that can never contain anything (like
<img>) don't need a closing tag or closing slash or anything, and
other elements (including <iframe>) must be explicitly closed with a
separate closing tag.
Of course, since HTML5 parsers are still much harder to dig up than
XML parsers, we still should probably continue outputting well-formed
XML, which means including these trailing slashes that are pointless
for browsers. Just a random little rant here. :)