Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
I support using html 5 new features, but I don't like the idea of starting to strip tags "just because we can". Currently MediaWiki does quite a good work on it. I don't see a reason to start removing tags. Yes, allegdely there's an space improvement but still...
It's something to consider. It will improve not only space, but also readability. Here's the doctype and <head> for http://aryeh.name/, in valid HTML 5:
[...]
Look at those two side by side for a minute, the first and the third, and tell me there's no reason to go with the first one if there's demonstrably no difference in how browsers treat them. Improving legibility for human readers of our HTML source isn't a *major* goal, but I don't think we should disregard it entirely, especially when there are modest size improvements to be had as well. The only reason I can think of to avoid it other than "leave well enough alone" is for the sake of screen-scraping bots. [...]
I don't know what Platonides' point was specifically but personally I find "hanging" tags (e. g. lacking close tags) very error-prone. I think if one has to explicitly close elements the probability of a "missed" one (that leaves text bold till kingdom^Wthe next paragraph starts) reduces dras- tically. Same goes for attributes in '"'s - if you put them around all your attributes, you do not have to think about whether each single attribute has a value that needs them.
So, while you could save some bytes in this process, you'd have to spend much more time in testing.
Tim