>>> 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.

Can't we define such error handling for XML, instead of letting the 
browser throw in a non well-formed error?

(Just a thought.)


-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/ >