Did you know: Some closing HTML tags are optional?

#1

Post by Woods369 » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

Did you know: Some closing HTML tags are optional?
html.spec.whatwg.org

Re: Did you know: Some closing HTML tags are optional?

#2

Post by theandrewbailey » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

Useful for code-golfing HTML, but the complexity of rules sounds like a maintenance nightmare for professional use.

Re: Did you know: Some closing HTML tags are optional?

#3

Post by grajaganDev » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #2

Useful for code-golfing HTML, but the complexity of rules sounds like a maintenance nightmare for professional use.

Yes and it increases XSS (cross site scripting) risk.

Re: Did you know: Some closing HTML tags are optional?

#4

Post by beardyw » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

HTML was intended at first to be hand crafted by scientists. That it should be forgiving is a good thing, because who wants a "this page has imperfect html" message.

Re: Did you know: Some closing HTML tags are optional?

#5

Post by metaloha » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

I've never dived (dove? doven?) into the output of an HTML minimizer, but I assumed this was one of the things it would do - remove all optional tags while retaining the same DOM tree output.