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Which browsers (historic or current versions) support any of the HTML/SGML SHORTTAG constructs?

Have any "widely" used browsers ever supported SHORTTAGS in any way? (IE6 I'm looking at you.)

SHORTTAG Example:

<p<a href="/">first part of the text</> second part

Got curious after reading an answer demonstrating difficult to parse "valid" HTML.

Tested my self on IE 7, Google Chrome 17, Firefox 11. None of which seemed to support them.

Community
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Qtax
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  • TIL! I guess good to know that somebody worked in this direction, but for the love of god I still can't understand why xml/xhtnl tags are not allowed to be closed anonymously like so **(p)hello world (a href="#")click me(/)(/)** - with proper brackets of course; couldn't figure out how to add them to a comment – Oleg Mar 07 '12 at 08:20

3 Answers3

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No major Browser supports tags like 

</>

cause feature like this hinders/hampers "omissibility" which is far more important and useful feature for most SGML languages.

If you omit a single closing tag in language+browser that support "SHORTTAGS" the whole structure might be damaged.

Empty elements in SGML, HTML, XML, and XHTML:

"In HTML, starting from the very first specification (HTML 2.0), up to and including HTML 4.01, both the omissibility features and the minimizability features have been "on". But while omissibility is supported by Web browsers, though with several bugs, minimization features were not implemented in browsers."

Boris D. Teoharov
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    +1 for the link and info. So that site claims that the "omissibility" is supported by browsers? Which browsers would that be? – Qtax Mar 08 '12 at 14:44
  • Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE9, they all support it. Older versions (let's say 2-3 years ago) may not auto close tags. However IE is the only major browser whose fans may use older versions of it. – Boris D. Teoharov Mar 08 '12 at 17:18
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Emacs-W3 used to support them (at least partially) but some time after XHTML 1.0 (with the HTML Compatibility Guidelines) was published the functionality was removed. (Since the "HTML Compatibility" depended on browsers not implementing SHOTTAGs).

No commonly used browser supports them, and you'll be hard pressed to find an obscure browser that does either.

Quentin
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I tested a few more browsers, all of which don't support it: Opera 11.61 , IE9 and Firefox 1.5.0.9

Steven De Groote
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