[Actionchix] HTML helping hands

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Thu Mar 16 15:13:21 EST 2006


chris writes:
> On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 08:56 +1100, Mary wrote:
> > there are a *lot* of people who still use:
> > 
> > <ul>
> > <li>list item 1
> > <li>list item 2
> > </ul>
> 
> The problem is that if you're trying to create a css-only layout, it
> will be difficult to do so with unclosed tags. 

Any DOM-based browser will close the li tags anyway, since there's
no way to represent unclosed tags in a tree representation.  Mary's
example above doesn't show unclosed tags; it shows tags with
implicit closure (the parser is smart enough to know that one <li>
tag ends where the next one begins, rather than trying to nest an
<li> inside another <li>), which is legal and unambiguous in html
4. Is there a case where CSS doesn't work with implicitly closed
tags?  I'm no CSS expert but the CSS I've seen works fine with
this sort of construct.

Of course, syntactically incorrect tags that really are unclosed
are often ambiguous and can cause problems with CSS. That's a
whole separate issue and can happen with xhtml as well as html 4.

If most volunteers want to use xhtml and we can use an embedded
validating editor that produces it, I certainly have no problem
with that!  The technology ought to be there for using embedded
richtext editors, and it would make it a lot easier for contributors
(why should people need to know html, let alone xhtml, in order
to contribute to the site?)  But I'm not convinced that "CSS on
unclosed li tags" should be a factor in making that choice.
More relevant questions: is there an embedded editor that
works well? Is it reasonably fast? Are there any volunteers for
whom that solution wouldn't work for some reason? Do we care whether
volunteers can compose locally then paste/upload into the CMS,
rather than using the embedded editor?

	...Akkana


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