tomhudson's Journal: All browser except IE have supported supertags for years ..

I first discovered "super-tags" more than half a decade ago, when I wondered what would happen if I tried to create and style my own tags, instead of just using the ones that are pre-defined in the html spec.

Most browsers "do the right thing" (and no, you don't need a special doctype declaration or DTD to do this) - they recognize ALL tags between a < and a > as html, and let you style them via css.

So for years, you've had the ability to use tags such as <article>, <section>, <sectionheading>, <footnote>, <book>, <chapter>, <sonata>, <brand>, <ad>, <flying_monkey>, <underpantsgnome>, , <etc>

The only exception, of course, is IE, which uses a fixed set of tags internally, and tag-specific handling code, rather than applying rules to togs in a general way. More here

tag soup, yuck

[Bill Dog]

How ironic, on a web site called "xmlsucks", there's an advocating of HTML being more XML-like.

I think of HTML is its own closed definition of a markup language, so I don't like your idea. I guess internally FF is doing some <ad> to <span class="<some_generated_unique_identifier>ad"> and then similarly to its styles table(s) in memory. A nice going of the extra mile in some sense, but entirely optional, IMO. (And in another sense, detrimental if I've explicitly asked for a strict mode of r

Re:

[tomhudson]

No - to the contrary, it's not "tag soup". It's the reduction of tags to the point where each tag has their own meaning, as defined by the author. Way better than the crapfest that is xml+xslt.

Also, there is absolutely no reason to invoke the abortion known as namespaces. Namespaces are the result of a lack of imagination. They might be of some use in c++ because of the need to separate different libraries to prevent namespace collison (but this can always be solved in other ways). They simply aren't

bleh

[Johann Lau]

as a (kinda horrible) workaround you can add your own tags to the tag list of this thing: http://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/ [google.com]

Re:

[tomhudson]

Thanks for the info.

Public repo for the latest HTML5 JavaScript shiv for IE to recognise and style the HTML5 elements.

My test javascript code was simpler - it just walks the DOM and converts anything between < and > that isn't an html 4x tag into a <div class=>, like this:

<foo id=bar> becomes <div class=foo id=bar>

</foo> becomes </div>, or at your option </div><!-- /foo --> if you want to document your closing divs.

Simple, easy to understand, and it

Re:

[drachenstern]

Have you shared this particular treewalker? I wouldn't mind having an already developed bit of code for this in case I start using the idea when I build a webapp this summer for myself (where bending the rules for demonstration is much easier to pull off than at the office ;) )

<UnderPantsGnomes>

[Shadow Wrought]

I tried using the <UnderPantsGnomes> but I was never able to profit at it.