Re: Clarification requested for necessity of </A>

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 94 14:00:50 EDT
Message-id: <9408101758.AA22966@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-wg@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: Clarification requested for necessity of </A> 
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In message <9408101559.AA28332@hook.spyglass.com>, Eric W. Sink writes:
>
>Q: Is it <em>ever</em> legal to omit the </A> tag?
>
>It has been asserted that the following is legal HTML:
>
><H1><A NAME="topofdocument">Welcome to the Top of the Document</H1>
>
>I disagree, and believe that the </A> should always be present.
>I checked our document, and it would appear that I am correct.
>Anyone care to clarify?

According to the current DTD, you're right.

By the way... the HTML validation service at

	http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-test/service/validation-form.html

is a great way to check these little things out. About the above line,
it says:

Input

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "+//ISBN 82-7640-037::WWW//DTD HTML Level 2//EN//2.0">
<HEAD>
<TITLE><!-- your title here --></TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
<!-- your HTML test data -->
<H1><A NAME="topofdocument">Welcome to the Top of the Document</H1>
</BODY>




Errors

sgmls: SGML error at -, line 7 at ">":
       A end-tag implied by H1 end-tag; not minimizable



Parsed Output (Element Structure Information Set)

(HTML
(HEAD
(TITLE
)TITLE
)HEAD
(BODY
(H1
ANAME CDATA topofdocument
AHREF IMPLIED
AREL IMPLIED
AREV IMPLIED
AURN IMPLIED
ATITLE IMPLIED
AMETHODS IMPLIED
(A
-Welcome to the Top of the Document
)A
)H1
)BODY
)HTML


On the other hand,

	(1) this syntax is expressible in SGML (it's a one-character
		change to the DTD), and
	(2) it "works" to a certain extent, at lease in Mosaic.
	(3) I've seen it in some docs out there.

If it "works" on "most" browsers, we should probably allow it, no?

Yuch. Blech.

Regardless of what the standard says, a prudent implementors would
support it :-{

Dan