Hello all,
Thanks for the input.
Let's see if I can summarize:
1. THE VALIDATOR's BEHAVIOUR
2. <br /> CONFORMING TO 4.01 SPEC.
3. HOW TO CHOOSE CODE
1. THE VALIDATOR's BEHAVIOUR
We don't know how teacher's document was coded, or the behaviour of the
Validator in March 2004.
So, that the teacher found his document invalid, may be due to wrong
coding and/or that the Validator may have wrongly interpreted the 4.01
Spec.
Let us just leave the discussion for this topic, as we cannot capture
what has gone before.
Currently (April 2005), the Validator validates <br /> and <img />, but
not <hr />, as HTML 4.01 Strict.
News for the W3C Markup Validator
http://validator.w3.org/whatsnew.html
2. <br /> CONFORMING TO 4.01 SPEC.
May be valid HTML 4.01
<br />, <br>>, <img />
An element (not the tags <>) may be followed by
character data (<br z>).
May not be valid HTML 4.01
<hr />, <hr>>, <meta />, <link />
HTML 4.01 Spec. and SGML Spec. may be interpreted differently by people
(Spec. authors, Web page authors, the Validator Team), and HTML 4.01
Spec. also has errors.
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html4-updates/errata
HTML 4.01 Spec.: On SGML and HTML
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html
SGML Source Home Page (by the SGML inventor himself)
http://www.sgmlsource.com/
3. HOW TO CHOOSE CODE
Following Liam Quinn's advice, I will use <> for HTML 4.01 Strict and
</> for XHTML, as I have done before.
Finally.
It would be nice if you could post links to W3C documents regarding the
above. And, links to people who has written comments on this topic.
(Thanks to Yucca for his link.)
Regards,
Thomas Jedenfelt