Re: How to retain the end tag when outputting an empty

On Sat, 2022-06-18 at 20:04 +0000, Peter Flynn peter@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> Yes, absolutely. However, web browsers sometimes fail to grok the
> difference between (say) <hr/> and <hr></hr> and thus render them
> differently, so when you output HTML or XHTML, it may make a
> difference.
>


"sometimes fail" - in particular </hr> isn't legal in HTML mode. The
<hr> is #empty and "self-closing", so after that the parser is not
expecting </hr>. When it see one, it imputes that there must have been
a missing <hr>, so <hr></hr> may turn into <hr><hr> when parsed in
HTML; same with <br>.

May and sometimes - depends on the DOCTYPE line: if it's not <DOCTYPE
html>, it'll depend on the individual browser. And in xhtml mode, you
should be able to use <hr></hr>, but it's not wise as HTML parsers will
go wrong with it :)

The Polyglot HTML spec says more about this.

liam

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