Re: lynx-dev Lynx interprets <a/> as </a>?

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 6 Dec 1999, Marco De la Cruz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I wrote a page which looks fine with Lynx
> but a couple of days later I took a glimpse
> at it with Netscape and I noticed something
> wrong with the first link. It seems I mistyped
> <a/> instead of </a>, but Lynx didn't seem
> to mind at all. This doesn't sound right.

Actually, in the development code since about 2.8.3dev.13, "<a/>"
is treated as "<a></a>".  The end result is still the same in this
case:  the anchor gets closed.

> I'm CCing this to the w3m developer because
> the problem seems to be invisible to w3m
> also (I don't have colour, though, maybe
> it's obvious then).

I do have color, I looked at it with w3m (19991117), it's obvious
that the anchor is not closed at the "<a/>".  But the "<a/>" isn't
shown visibly as in links.

> "Links", however,
> explictly showed me the incorrect <a/>,
> leaving no doubt about my mistake. This
> seems to me to be a reasonable behaviour
> (though I may be wrong).
> 
> Anyway, the example page is at:
> http://128.100.80.13/marco/badclosing.html

You have three different browsers and get three different reactions.
That should tell you something...

There is an error in the HTML, so there is no defined behavior that a
browser should follow.  They have to recover from the error in some
way.  All three choices are reasonable, IMO.

It seems you are expecting a browser to act like a validator.  Don't
do that.  Use a real validator, or maybe other sort of HTML checker.
The Lynx Help Page has links to a couple.

  Klaus