[uf-dev] Defining and Extending Value Excepting

[Toby A Inkster]

Although this sounds like a nice idea, I've previously been informed  
that requiring empty inline elements is a non-starter, as many HTML  
processors (including "tidy" with its default settings) strip these out.

Preliminary testing with tidy (version: 1 September 2005) shows this  
to be true. Some parsers, including X2V IIRC, pre-process non-XHTML  
HTML by running it through tidy to get it into well-formed XML.  
Skimming through the tidy documentation, I can't see a way of  
disabling this empty inline element stripping behaviour.

If people *want* to publish data that uses empty inline elements,  
then that's fair enough, but with the current state of HTML  
processors, it's probably unwise to publish a pattern that *requires*  
the use of empty inline elements.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>