On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Trejkaz Xaoza wrote:
>>
>> But the XHTML spec doesn't require this -- it only requires 
>> wellformedness checking.
>
> Oh great.  So regardless of what gets specified, we will still get 
> people using random tag soup instead of valid XHTML, thanks to the 
> browsers following a spec which says they're allowed to render invalid 
> documents.

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.

In XHTML, because of XML wellformedness rules, the above MUST cause the 
processor to abort, so it is never a problem.

Now, if an author says:

    <ul>
     <p> Something </p>
    </ul>

...it might be _semantically_ unclear what they mean, but at least 
syntactically, it is unambiguous, and thus there is a single correct 
rendering and correct DOM.

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