<story><title>To close or not to close – Void HTML elements</title><url>http://www.colorglare.com/2014/02/03/to-close-or-not-to-close.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhaak</author><text>This. I wish they didn&amp;#x27;t do a HTML5 but instead only did a XHTML5.&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of good ideas in HTML5 but why did there need to be _another_ way of parsing HTML-like documents?&lt;p&gt;Apparently because it&amp;#x27;s the one HTML-parser to surpass and replace all other HTML-parsers out there. &amp;lt;sarcasm&amp;gt;Yeah, I totally believe that.&amp;lt;&amp;#x2F;sarcasm&amp;gt;</text></item><item><author>jrockway</author><text>HTML loves its special cases.  XML is overly complex, but at least your editor doesn&amp;#x27;t need to know anything special about what document type you&amp;#x27;re writing in order to indent it properly.  Throw in HTML&amp;#x27;s special cases, and now it needs to know that &amp;lt;br&amp;gt; is different from &amp;lt;foo&amp;gt;.&lt;p&gt;I guess since HTML is so common it doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter, but really?  We need 5 differnt types of markup, when one would have been fine?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/927/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xkcd.com&amp;#x2F;927&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeswin</author><text>I prefer HTML over XHTML, because it is easier to write. I don&amp;#x27;t get the reasoning behind closing tags. LIs close before the next LI, or the UL. &amp;lt;BR&amp;gt; saves two characters over &amp;lt;BR &amp;#x2F;&amp;gt; and causes no harm. XHTML feels like  trying too hard to make the machine overlord happy.&lt;p&gt;It is plain wrong to make a standard easier for machine-parsing at the expense of humans who are typing it in.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Another example. I write some HTML in a text-editor&amp;#x2F;textarea and send it across to someone. If I missed a &amp;lt;&amp;#x2F;LI&amp;gt;, should the parser reject it? If not, the standard should be accommodating enough so that this is valid.</text></comment>
<story><title>To close or not to close – Void HTML elements</title><url>http://www.colorglare.com/2014/02/03/to-close-or-not-to-close.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhaak</author><text>This. I wish they didn&amp;#x27;t do a HTML5 but instead only did a XHTML5.&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of good ideas in HTML5 but why did there need to be _another_ way of parsing HTML-like documents?&lt;p&gt;Apparently because it&amp;#x27;s the one HTML-parser to surpass and replace all other HTML-parsers out there. &amp;lt;sarcasm&amp;gt;Yeah, I totally believe that.&amp;lt;&amp;#x2F;sarcasm&amp;gt;</text></item><item><author>jrockway</author><text>HTML loves its special cases.  XML is overly complex, but at least your editor doesn&amp;#x27;t need to know anything special about what document type you&amp;#x27;re writing in order to indent it properly.  Throw in HTML&amp;#x27;s special cases, and now it needs to know that &amp;lt;br&amp;gt; is different from &amp;lt;foo&amp;gt;.&lt;p&gt;I guess since HTML is so common it doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter, but really?  We need 5 differnt types of markup, when one would have been fine?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/927/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xkcd.com&amp;#x2F;927&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s excellent that HTML5 completely specifies the parsing in a very clear, and most backwards-compatible way; judging by what the big browser vendors have been doing, they seem to be following it. (It also gives a nice starting point that makes it easier for anyone to write their own parser, and have it behave the same as any other mainstream browser - and having the possibility of making more browsers available, with the same standard parsing behaviour, is a good thing.)</text></comment>