alt Hacker NewsIn the early 2000s I was 100% sold on the idea of strict XHTML documents and the semantic web. I loved the idea that all web pages could be XML documents which easily provided their data for other sources. If you marked your document with, an XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.1 doctype, a web browser was supposed to show an error if the page contained an XML error. Problem was, it was a bit of a pain to get this right, so effectively no one cared about making compliant XHTML. It was a nice idea, but it didn't interact well with the real world.
Decades later, I'm still mildly annoyed when I see self-closing tags in HTML. When you're not trying to build a strict XML document, they're no longer required. Now I read them as a vestigial reminder of the strict XHTML dream.
EDIT: I just checked, and my site (at least the index page) still validates! https://validator.nu/?showsource=yes&doc=https%3A%2F%2Fander...
EDIT2: Hey, look, if you still want to use self-closing tags where they're not required: go nuts! I'm just explaining why I don't use them anymore.
Replies
> I'm still mildly annoyed when I see self-closing tags in HTML
Why? That's (mildly) bad for your health.
You're annoyed when people are trying to keep the dream alive?
Since HTML5 specifies how to handle all parse errors, and the handling of an XML self-closing tag is to ignore it unless it's part of an unquoted attribute value, it's valid HTML5.
As someone who has gotten into the idea of semantic Web long after XHTML was all the rage[0], I somewhat resent that semantic Web and XML are so often lumped together[1]. After all, XML is just one serialisation mechanism for linked data.
[0] I don’t dislike XHTML. The snob in me loves the idea. Sure, had XHTML been The Standard it would have been so much more difficult to publish my first website at the age of 14 that I’m not sure I would have gotten into building for Web at all, but is it necessarily a good thing if our field is based on technology so forgiving to malformed input that a middle school pupil can pass for an engineer? and while I do omit closing tags when allowed by the spec, are the savings worth remembering these complicated rules for when they can be omitted, and is it worth maintaining all this branching that allows parsers to handle invalid markup, when barely any HTML is hand-written these days?
[1] Usually it is to the detriment of the former: the latter tends to be ill-regarded by today’s average Web developer used to JSON (even as they hail various schema-related additions on top of JSON that essentially try to make it do things XML can, but worse).