Re: cdata and javascript

Jeff wrote:
Andy Dingley wrote:
On 28 Jan, 14:46, Jeff <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't have a problem with writing HTML XHTMLish, I even like the much
maligned <br />.

Why? That's just plain wrong.

Why? It's a self closing tag and it works in every browser. The trend is toward closing every tag you open.

In HTML, <br> is one of the tags (along with <input>, <link>, <meta:>, and so forth) that doesn't *have* a closing tag, so it's equally meaningless to make the opening tag a "self-closing" tag. Moreover, the slash has another meaning in SGML (HTML is to SGML as XHTML is to XML) as follows:

<title/My Page/

is equivalent to

<title>My Page</title>

So

<br />This sentence has a / (slash) character.

would be treated in a correctly performing HTML user agent as

<br>>This sentence has a </br> (slash) character.

which is certainly not what you want. The reason

<br />

works in real browsers is that they haven't implemented that detail of SGML--in other words, it relies on a browser deficiency. Instead they wind up treating the slash as something that simply doesn't belong there, and they handle it the same way they handle anything that doesn't belong there--they pretend it isn't there. That doesn't mean it's valid--it isn't. It's just being ignored.
.

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