[thelist] Why do we say what we say?
Stephen Rider
evolt_org at striderweb.com
Thu Oct 25 11:23:28 CDT 2007
On Oct 25, 2007, at 8:28 AM, cj wrote:
> On 10/25/07, Rick den Haan <rick.denhaan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Something else that the validator will happily ignore is code
>> indentation.
>> ... Other
>> developers tend to close their elements after the indentation, e.g.:
>>
>> <ul
>>> <li>Item 1</li
>>> <li>Item 2</li
>>> </ul>
>>
>> I never saw the point in that, but I'm told it could get rid of some
>> unwanted space in some browsers.
Some versions of IE has issues with that. HTML is supposed to ignore
whitespace, but < IE6 (?) does not.
I use this, and it has fixed the problem for me:
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li></ul>
Though it can be annoying when rearranging a list. IE annoying? You
don't say!
Regarding spaces in self-closing elements such as <br />, my
understanding is this:
Officially, HTML rendering is supposed to ignore attributes it
doesn't understand. br is a legitimate tag, but br/ is not. Thus,
<br/> is illegitimate HTML tag, while <br /> is a legitimate HTML tag
with an unknown "/" attribute. IN THEORY, an html renderer should no
more understand <br/> than it understands <blearg>.
So they stuck the space into the XHTML spec specifically for
backwards compatibility with HTML.
Stephen Rider
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