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I believe they've been optional in every version of HTML. The example document in the HTML+ spec (1993) did not use them: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/HTMLPlus/ht
by pdw 7y ago
I believe they've been optional in every version of HTML.
The example document in the HTML+ spec (1993) did not use them: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/HTMLPlus/htmlplus_7.html https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/HTMLPlus/htmlplus_7.html
The HTML 2.0 spec gives this as its first example:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<title>Parsing Example</title>
<p>Some text. <em>*wow*</em></p>
- gsnedders 7y agoThe very first draft HTML spec, https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt (June 1993), is somewhat interesting here, because the only element with optional start and end tags is the html element (head and body require both start and end tags, per that spec). Certainly by the point of HTML 2.0 (November 1995; the first non-draft spec for HTML) all three elements have start and end tags all optional. The more general ability to omit start/end tags from given elements is a feature of SGML (October 1986), and HTML 2.0 to HTML 4.01 were defined as SGML applications (though approximately nothing ever used an SGML parser for HTML).