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24 10 2007

firefox not properly parsing XML/XHTML ?

Posted by: Kae Verens, in web development

Look at these examples - semantically, they are exactly the same:

<ul><li />one<li>two</li><li />three</ul>

<ul><li></li>one<li>two</li><li></li>three</ul>

In both cases, they are invalid, but Firefox renders one of them correctly and not the other…

example one

  • one
  • two
  • three

example two

  • one

  • two

  • three

Interesting! Noticed while explaining why ‘ /’ is used at the end of self-closing elements in XHTML.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “firefox not properly parsing XML/XHTML ?”

  1. Jaap says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 12:54 pm

    How are you testing this? Is the document being sent with the correct xhtml mimetype (application xml+xhtml)? Otherwise you are just testing the cleanup routine of tagsoup HTML.

  2. Kae Verens says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 7:16 am

    whether the mime-type is correct or not (it’s not - it’s text/html, and an XHTML Doctype) should not matter - what matters is that <li /> means exactly the same as <li></li> and should be treated the same.

    Besides - what’s the point of a Doctype if you’re going to ignore it and only trust the mime-type?

    Not that I really care - it’s just a curious treatment of invalid code anyway.

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