366623 - Elements not closing properly when using <.../>

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[wizofaus]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: 1.5.0.9

Given the following HTML:

<style>
a { color: red;}
</style>
<a name="test" />Why is this text red?

Firefox does not appear to recognise that the anchor tag is closed.  Actually any A element with just a 'name' and no HREF shouldn't even need closing under pre-XHTML1.0.  But even specifying XHTML 1.0 strict doesn't help here.
The only way to avoid this is to use
<a name="test"></a>

It's not just a problem with A elements, BTW, it happens with everything.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Save above code into file
2. Load into browser



Expected Results:  
Text should not be red.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

If you serve XHTML as text/html, it's HTML with some extra attributes named "/" - that's why Appendix C tells you not to use <foo /> unless foo is an empty element in HTML. It's possible to write XHTML that survives treatment as text/html, but that doesn't change the rules for text/html: if you want application/xhtml+xml's parsing rules, you have to send application/xhtml+xml, with all that entails.

Comment 2

[wizofaus]

Yes, I read this elsewhere later.  But a lot of sites do use this technique for named anchor tags, or don't close them at all, and they look fine in I.E.  I suppose it's more an issue of being sensible about how to interpret a page with a missing close tag for a named anchor.