It is undesirable, because clients cannot tell, wether a document is
conforming or not. So - being SGML-aware - they would have to parse all
received documents with a certain DTD, barfing at all the non-conforming
documents they receive.
The difference between LI and A is, that
1) LI can appear only in a well-defined structural context (lists),
and
2) clients do not have to do a thing, when a </LI> is encountered or
to be implied, whereas they have to do something, when they see
the </A>-tag, nameley stop using the special anchor-rendering.
>A convention could be established that end-tag omission on an anchor is only
>used when the anchor is defining a name, never when the anchor is defining a
>hypertext link. Authors who violate this convention would get what they
>deserve.
The whole idea of SGML is replacing informal conventions with formal
specifications. That the A element is used both for link source and link
target was probably not one of the best design decision in HTML.
>As it happens, this appears to be the de-facto state of affairs, at least so
>far as WebMaker is concerned. If this is not to be the standard, then WebMaker
>needs to be changed and any documents using this technique need to be cleaned
>up.
This "feature"of WebMaker is a plain bug in my eyes, since the DTD says,
that there is no end tag omision for A. And WebMaker needs to be changed
then, yes.
Greetings
Wolfgang Rieger
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Wolfgang Rieger
c/o Buero fuer Software-Entwicklung
Frankfurter Ring 193a
80807 Munich
Germany
Tel. : +49 89 323 19 93 Fax: +49 89 323 19 93
Email: rieger@colin.muc.de
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