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Comment by pavpanchekha | Hacker News Reader

I think the author's recommendations at the end, on making <meta> and <img> and <script> more sane, are good examples of where the "implement then standardize" process that the W3C uses falls down. In fact, XHTML2 (which was never implemented) had some good ideas. On the other hand, as we've seen so many times, implement then standardize reduces foot-dragging and needless bike-shedding. You take the good with the bad, I guess.

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I've been burned before by using <script src="..." /> and assuming it would work in all browsers. Instead, it subsumed later tags in a horrible way. I've never used empty-elements in HTML since.

`<script src="foo" />` only works the way you’d expect it to in XHTML. Proper XHTML, that is — served with the correct `Content-Type` header. http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/xhtml5

Chrome explicitly stopped supporting void syntax on the script tag to encourage people to use </script> so IE wouldn't die when it saw a <script />.

That's messed up - really? Chrome covering up IE's mistakes??

Read the article, there's no way to specify "optional closing tag depending on whether a `src` property is present" so therefore it's manditory. You can, of course, write the parser to do it, but there isn't a way to express it in the HTML grammar.

I always have wished that the script inside the tag would be executed if the `src` couldn't be loaded, which is something John Resig suggested years ago [1].

[1] http://ejohn.org/blog/degrading-script-tags/

I think it's awesome, actually. Good neighbourship. Not that they should do this all the time (there would be no end to it), but for the most egregious problems, yes, why not?

XHTML2 was largely fantastic, imo, and would have been an excellent successor to html. If it had been what started out the XHTML process I think it would have been more successful, but XHTML1 was such a foot-in-both-worlds mess that it needed to be put out of its misery.

The big problem with XHTML2 was that it was designed by people who hated HTML. So they went and made it purposefully incompatible with HTML and XHTML1 in various ways (e.g. tags with the same localName and in the same namespace were supposed to have different behavior).

That made it impossible for a browser to implement both XHTML2 and XHTML1 at once (which was in fact the goal of some of the committee members). And then browsers were faced with the choice of implementing XHTML2 (no content at all out there) or XHTML1+HTML (lots of content out there) but not both, they picked the one you'd expect them to pick...

Actually hardly anyone wanted XHTML2, because it was a purely academic excercise in making established things harder (<a href="..." target="_blank") without compelling features.

I tried to use it but then completely reverted to HTML4. Thank god we have HTML5 now.

> making established things harder (<a href="..." target="_blank")

What are you referring to? That example would have worked identically.

It's invalid in XHTML2, as well as XHTML 1 Strict.

You mean the target attribute? It wasn't in XHTML 1 Strict or 1.1, but you're wrong about XHTML 2. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-hyperAttributes.html#adef_hy...

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