On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Mikko Rantalainen wrote:
>>
>> The primary problem with Tag Soup is not that documents are invalid, 
>> it's that documents are ambiguous.
>> 
>> What does:
>> 
>>     <strong> A <em> B </strong> C </em>
>> 
>> ...translate to, as far as the DOM and CSS goes? No spec defines this.
>
> Well, let's just define that and the problem is gone. How about we say 
> that the opening tags override closing tags in case there are syntax 
> errors (or the other way around) and parser should keep a stack of open 
> elements so it can automatically close elements with incorrect markup.

That (or something like it) is what HTML should have said when it was 
first specified, yes.

By now, there are billions of pages that depend on exactly what Windows IE 
does for each possible markup error, so it's nigh on impossible to specify 
an exact algorithm.

But yes, in principle, that's exactly what I'm saying. Specs should 
define all these cases.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/        U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'