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Link to original content: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/introduction.html
Living Standard — Last Updated 26 November 2024
This specification defines a big part of the web platform, in lots of detail. Its place in the web platform specification stack relative to other specifications can be best summed up as follows:
This section is non-normative.
In short: Yes.
In more length: the term "HTML5" is widely used as a buzzword to refer to modern web technologies, many of which (though by no means all) are developed at the WHATWG. This document is one such; others are available from the WHATWG Standards overview.
This section is non-normative.
HTML is the World Wide Web's core markup language. Originally, HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing scientific documents. Its general design, however, has enabled it to be adapted, over the subsequent years, to describe a number of other types of documents and even applications.
This section is non-normative.
This specification is intended for authors of documents and scripts that use the features defined in this specification, implementers of tools that operate on pages that use the features defined in this specification, and individuals wishing to establish the correctness of documents or implementations with respect to the requirements of this specification.
This document is probably not suited to readers who do not already have at least a passing familiarity with web technologies, as in places it sacrifices clarity for precision, and brevity for completeness. More approachable tutorials and authoring guides can provide a gentler introduction to the topic.
In particular, familiarity with the basics of DOM is necessary for a complete understanding of some of the more technical parts of this specification. An understanding of Web IDL, HTTP, XML, Unicode, character encodings, JavaScript, and CSS will also be helpful in places but is not essential.
This section is non-normative.
This specification is limited to providing a semantic-level markup language and associated semantic-level scripting APIs for authoring accessible pages on the web ranging from static documents to dynamic applications.
The scope of this specification does not include providing mechanisms for media-specific customization of presentation (although default rendering rules for web browsers are included at the end of this specification, and several mechanisms for hooking into CSS are provided as part of the language).
The scope of this specification is not to describe an entire operating system. In particular, hardware configuration software, image manipulation tools, and applications that users would be expected to use with high-end workstations on a daily basis are out of scope. In terms of applications, this specification is targeted specifically at applications that would be expected to be used by users on an occasional basis, or regularly but from disparate locations, with low CPU requirements. Examples of such applications include online purchasing systems, searching systems, games (especially multiplayer online games), public telephone books or address books, communications software (email clients, instant messaging clients, discussion software), document editing software, etc.
This section is non-normative.
For its first five years (1990-1995), HTML went through a number of revisions and experienced a number of extensions, primarily hosted first at CERN, and then at the IETF.
With the creation of the W3C, HTML's development changed venue again. A first abortive attempt at extending HTML in 1995 known as HTML 3.0 then made way to a more pragmatic approach known as HTML 3.2, which was completed in 1997. HTML4 quickly followed later that same year.
The following year, the W3C membership decided to stop evolving HTML and instead begin work on an XML-based equivalent, called XHTML. This effort started with a reformulation of HTML4 in XML, known as XHTML 1.0, which added no new features except the new serialization, and which was completed in 2000. After XHTML 1.0, the W3C's focus turned to making it easier for other working groups to extend XHTML, under the banner of XHTML Modularization. In parallel with this, the W3C also worked on a new language that was not compatible with the earlier HTML and XHTML languages, calling it XHTML2.
Around the time that HTML's evolution was stopped in 1998, parts of the API for HTML developed by browser vendors were specified and published under the name DOM Level 1 (in 1998) and DOM Level 2 Core and DOM Level 2 HTML (starting in 2000 and culminating in 2003). These efforts then petered out, with some DOM Level 3 specifications published in 2004 but the working group being closed before all the Level 3 drafts were completed.
In 2003, the publication of XForms, a technology which was positioned as the next generation of web forms, sparked a renewed interest in evolving HTML itself, rather than finding replacements for it. This interest was borne from the realization that XML's deployment as a web technology was limited to entirely new technologies (like RSS and later Atom), rather than as a replacement for existing deployed technologies (like HTML).
A proof of concept to show that it was possible to extend HTML4's forms to provide many of the features that XForms 1.0 introduced, without requiring browsers to implement rendering engines that were incompatible with existing HTML web pages, was the first result of this renewed interest. At this early stage, while the draft was already publicly available, and input was already being solicited from all sources, the specification was only under Opera Software's copyright.
The idea that HTML's evolution should be reopened was tested at a W3C workshop in 2004, where some of the principles that underlie the HTML5 work (described below), as well as the aforementioned early draft proposal covering just forms-related features, were presented to the W3C jointly by Mozilla and Opera. The proposal was rejected on the grounds that the proposal conflicted with the previously chosen direction for the web's evolution; the W3C staff and membership voted to continue developing XML-based replacements instead.
Shortly thereafter, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera jointly announced their intent to continue working on the effort under the umbrella of a new venue called the WHATWG. A public mailing list was created, and the draft was moved to the WHATWG site. The copyright was subsequently amended to be jointly owned by all three vendors, and to allow reuse of the specification.
The WHATWG was based on several core principles, in particular that technologies need to be backwards compatible, that specifications and implementations need to match even if this means changing the specification rather than the implementations, and that specifications need to be detailed enough that implementations can achieve complete interoperability without reverse-engineering each other.
The latter requirement in particular required that the scope of the HTML5 specification include what had previously been specified in three separate documents: HTML4, XHTML1, and DOM2 HTML. It also meant including significantly more detail than had previously been considered the norm.
In 2006, the W3C indicated an interest to participate in the development of HTML5 after all, and in 2007 formed a working group chartered to work with the WHATWG on the development of the HTML5 specification. Apple, Mozilla, and Opera allowed the W3C to publish the specification under the W3C copyright, while keeping a version with the less restrictive license on the WHATWG site.
For a number of years, both groups then worked together. In 2011, however, the groups came to the conclusion that they had different goals: the W3C wanted to publish a "finished" version of "HTML5", while the WHATWG wanted to continue working on a Living Standard for HTML, continuously maintaining the specification rather than freezing it in a state with known problems, and adding new features as needed to evolve the platform.
In 2019, the WHATWG and W3C signed an agreement to collaborate on a single version of HTML going forward: this document.
This section is non-normative.
It must be admitted that many aspects of HTML appear at first glance to be nonsensical and inconsistent.
HTML, its supporting DOM APIs, as well as many of its supporting technologies, have been developed over a period of several decades by a wide array of people with different priorities who, in many cases, did not know of each other's existence.
Features have thus arisen from many sources, and have not always been designed in especially consistent ways. Furthermore, because of the unique characteristics of the web, implementation bugs have often become de-facto, and now de-jure, standards, as content is often unintentionally written in ways that rely on them before they can be fixed.
Despite all this, efforts have been made to adhere to certain design goals. These are described in the next few subsections.
This section is non-normative.
To avoid exposing web authors to the complexities of multithreading, the HTML and DOM APIs are designed such that no script can ever detect the simultaneous execution of other scripts. Even with workers, the intent is that the behavior of implementations can be thought of as completely serializing the execution of all scripts in all globals.
The exception to this general design principle is the JavaScript SharedArrayBuffer
class. Using SharedArrayBuffer objects, it can in fact be observed that scripts in
other agents are executing simultaneously. Furthermore, due to the
JavaScript memory model, there are situations which not only are un-representable via serialized
script execution, but also un-representable via serialized statement execution
among those scripts.
This section is non-normative.
This specification interacts with and relies on a wide variety of other specifications. In certain circumstances, unfortunately, conflicting needs have led to this specification violating the requirements of these other specifications. Whenever this has occurred, the transgressions have each been noted as a "willful violation", and the reason for the violation has been noted.
This section is non-normative.
HTML has a wide array of extensibility mechanisms that can be used for adding semantics in a safe manner:
Authors can use the class attribute to extend elements,
effectively creating their own elements, while using the most applicable existing "real" HTML
element, so that browsers and other tools that don't know of the extension can still support it
somewhat well. This is the tack used by microformats, for example.
Authors can include data for inline client-side scripts or server-side site-wide scripts
to process using the data-*="" attributes. These are guaranteed
to never be touched by browsers, and allow scripts to include data on HTML elements that scripts
can then look for and process.
Authors can use the <meta name="" content=""> mechanism to
include page-wide metadata.
Authors can use the rel="" mechanism to annotate
links with specific meanings by registering extensions to
the predefined set of link types. This is also used by microformats.
Authors can embed raw data using the <script type="">
mechanism with a custom type, for further handling by inline or server-side scripts.
Authors can extend APIs using the JavaScript prototyping mechanism. This is widely used by script libraries, for instance.
Authors can use the microdata feature (the itemscope="" and itemprop=""
attributes) to embed nested name-value pairs of data to be shared with other applications and
sites.
Authors can define, share, and use custom elements to extend the vocabulary of HTML. The requirements of valid custom element names ensure forward compatibility (since no elements will be added to HTML, SVG, or MathML with hyphen-containing local names in the future).
This section is non-normative.
This specification defines an abstract language for describing documents and applications, and some APIs for interacting with in-memory representations of resources that use this language.
The in-memory representation is known as "DOM HTML", or "the DOM" for short.
There are various concrete syntaxes that can be used to transmit resources that use this abstract language, two of which are defined in this specification.
The first such concrete syntax is the HTML syntax. This is the format suggested for most
authors. It is compatible with most legacy web browsers. If a document is transmitted with the
text/html MIME type, then it will be processed as an HTML document by
web browsers. This specification defines the latest HTML syntax, known simply as "HTML".
The second concrete syntax is XML. When a document is transmitted with an XML MIME
type, such as application/xhtml+xml, then it is treated as an XML document by
web browsers, to be parsed by an XML processor. Authors are reminded that the processing for XML
and HTML differs; in particular, even minor syntax errors will prevent a document labeled as XML
from being rendered fully, whereas they would be ignored in the HTML syntax.
The XML syntax for HTML was formerly referred to as "XHTML", but this specification does not use that term (among other reasons, because no such term is used for the HTML syntaxes of MathML and SVG).
The DOM, the HTML syntax, and the XML syntax cannot all represent the same content. For
example, namespaces cannot be represented using the HTML syntax, but they are supported in the DOM
and in the XML syntax. Similarly, documents that use the noscript feature can be
represented using the HTML syntax, but cannot be represented with the DOM or in the XML syntax.
Comments that contain the string "-->" can only be represented in the
DOM, not in the HTML and XML syntaxes.
This section is non-normative.
This specification is divided into the following major sections:
EventSource, and a two-way full-duplex socket protocol for scripts known as Web
Sockets.There are also some appendices, listing obsolete features and IANA considerations, and several indices.
This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections from the contents list and following all the cross-references.
As described in the conformance requirements section below, this specification describes conformance criteria for a variety of conformance classes. In particular, there are conformance requirements that apply to producers, for example authors and the documents they create, and there are conformance requirements that apply to consumers, for example web browsers. They can be distinguished by what they are requiring: a requirement on a producer states what is allowed, while a requirement on a consumer states how software is to act.
For example, "the foo attribute's value must be a valid
integer" is a requirement on producers, as it lays out the allowed values; in contrast,
the requirement "the foo attribute's value must be parsed using the
rules for parsing integers" is a requirement on consumers, as it describes how to
process the content.
Requirements on producers have no bearing whatsoever on consumers.
Continuing the above example, a requirement stating that a particular attribute's value is constrained to being a valid integer emphatically does not imply anything about the requirements on consumers. It might be that the consumers are in fact required to treat the attribute as an opaque string, completely unaffected by whether the value conforms to the requirements or not. It might be (as in the previous example) that the consumers are required to parse the value using specific rules that define how invalid (non-numeric in this case) values are to be processed.
This is a definition, requirement, or explanation.
This is a note.
This is an example.
This is an open issue.
This is a warning.
[Exposed =Window ]
interface Example {
// this is an IDL definition
};variable = object.method([optionalArgument])This is a note to authors describing the usage of an interface.
/* this is a CSS fragment */ The defining instance of a term is marked up like this. Uses of that term are marked up like this or like this.
The defining instance of an element, attribute, or API is marked up like this. References to that element, attribute, or API are marked up
like this.
Other code fragments are marked up like this.
Variables are marked up like this.
In an algorithm, steps in synchronous sections are marked with ⌛.
In some cases, requirements are given in the form of lists with conditions and corresponding requirements. In such cases, the requirements that apply to a condition are always the first set of requirements that follow the condition, even in the case of there being multiple sets of conditions for those requirements. Such cases are presented as follows:
This section is non-normative.
A basic HTML document looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
< html lang = "en" >
< head >
< title > Sample page</ title >
</ head >
< body >
< h1 > Sample page</ h1 >
< p > This is a < a href = "demo.html" > simple</ a > sample.</ p >
<!-- this is a comment -->
</ body >
</ html > HTML documents consist of a tree of elements and text. Each element is denoted in the source by
a start tag, such as "<body>", and
an end tag, such as "</body>".
(Certain start tags and end tags can in certain cases be omitted and are implied by other tags.)
Tags have to be nested such that elements are all completely within each other, without overlapping:
< p > This is < em > very < strong > wrong</ em > !</ strong ></ p > < p > This < em > is < strong > correct</ strong > .</ em ></ p > This specification defines a set of elements that can be used in HTML, along with rules about the ways in which the elements can be nested.
Elements can have attributes, which control how the elements work. In the example below, there
is a hyperlink, formed using the a element and its href attribute:
< a href = "demo.html" > simple</ a > Attributes are placed inside the start tag, and consist
of a name and a value, separated by an "=" character.
The attribute value can remain unquoted if it doesn't contain ASCII
whitespace or any of " ' ` = < or >. Otherwise, it has to be quoted using either single or double quotes. The
value, along with the "=" character, can be omitted altogether if the value
is the empty string.
<!-- empty attributes -->
< input name = address disabled >
< input name = address disabled = "" >
<!-- attributes with a value -->
< input name = address maxlength = 200 >
< input name = address maxlength = '200' >
< input name = address maxlength = "200" > HTML user agents (e.g., web browsers) then parse this markup, turning it into a DOM (Document Object Model) tree. A DOM tree is an in-memory representation of a document.
DOM trees contain several kinds of nodes, in particular a DocumentType node,
Element nodes, Text nodes, Comment nodes, and in some cases
ProcessingInstruction nodes.
The markup snippet at the top of this section would be turned into the following DOM tree:
The document element of this tree is the html element, which is the
element always found in that position in HTML documents. It contains two elements,
head and body, as well as a Text node between them.
There are many more Text nodes in the DOM tree than one would initially expect,
because the source contains a number of spaces (represented here by "␣") and line breaks
("⏎") that all end up as Text nodes in the DOM. However, for historical
reasons not all of the spaces and line breaks in the original markup appear in the DOM. In
particular, all the whitespace before head start tag ends up being dropped silently,
and all the whitespace after the body end tag ends up placed at the end of the
body.
The head element contains a title element, which itself contains a
Text node with the text "Sample page". Similarly, the body element
contains an h1 element, a p element, and a comment.
This DOM tree can be manipulated from scripts in the page. Scripts (typically in JavaScript)
are small programs that can be embedded using the script element or using event
handler content attributes. For example, here is a form with a script that sets the value
of the form's output element to say "Hello World":
< form name = "main" >
Result: < output name = "result" ></ output >
< script >
document. forms. main. elements. result. value = 'Hello World' ;
</ script >
</ form > Each element in the DOM tree is represented by an object, and these objects have APIs so that
they can be manipulated. For instance, a link (e.g. the a element in the tree above)
can have its "href" attribute changed in several
ways:
var a = document. links[ 0 ]; // obtain the first link in the document
a. href = 'sample.html' ; // change the destination URL of the link
a. protocol = 'https' ; // change just the scheme part of the URL
a. setAttribute( 'href' , 'https://example.com/' ); // change the content attribute directly Since DOM trees are used as the way to represent HTML documents when they are processed and presented by implementations (especially interactive implementations like web browsers), this specification is mostly phrased in terms of DOM trees, instead of the markup described above.
HTML documents represent a media-independent description of interactive content. HTML documents might be rendered to a screen, or through a speech synthesizer, or on a braille display. To influence exactly how such rendering takes place, authors can use a styling language such as CSS.
In the following example, the page has been made yellow-on-blue using CSS.
<!DOCTYPE html>
< html lang = "en" >
< head >
< title > Sample styled page</ title >
< style >
body { background : navy ; color : yellow ; }
</ style >
</ head >
< body >
< h1 > Sample styled page</ h1 >
< p > This page is just a demo.</ p >
</ body >
</ html > For more details on how to use HTML, authors are encouraged to consult tutorials and guides. Some of the examples included in this specification might also be of use, but the novice author is cautioned that this specification, by necessity, defines the language with a level of detail that might be difficult to understand at first.
This section is non-normative.
When HTML is used to create interactive sites, care needs to be taken to avoid introducing vulnerabilities through which attackers can compromise the integrity of the site itself or of the site's users.
A comprehensive study of this matter is beyond the scope of this document, and authors are strongly encouraged to study the matter in more detail. However, this section attempts to provide a quick introduction to some common pitfalls in HTML application development.
The security model of the web is based on the concept of "origins", and correspondingly many of the potential attacks on the web involve cross-origin actions. [ORIGIN]
When accepting untrusted input, e.g. user-generated content such as text comments, values in URL parameters, messages from third-party sites, etc, it is imperative that the data be validated before use, and properly escaped when displayed. Failing to do this can allow a hostile user to perform a variety of attacks, ranging from the potentially benign, such as providing bogus user information like a negative age, to the serious, such as running scripts every time a user looks at a page that includes the information, potentially propagating the attack in the process, to the catastrophic, such as deleting all data in the server.
When writing filters to validate user input, it is imperative that filters always be safelist-based, allowing known-safe constructs and disallowing all other input. Blocklist-based filters that disallow known-bad inputs and allow everything else are not secure, as not everything that is bad is yet known (for example, because it might be invented in the future).
For example, suppose a page looked at its URL's query string to determine what to display, and the site then redirected the user to that page to display a message, as in:
< ul >
< li >< a href = "message.cgi?say=Hello" > Say Hello</ a >
< li >< a href = "message.cgi?say=Welcome" > Say Welcome</ a >
< li >< a href = "message.cgi?say=Kittens" > Say Kittens</ a >
</ ul > If the message was just displayed to the user without escaping, a hostile attacker could then craft a URL that contained a script element:
https://example.com/message.cgi?say=%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27Oh%20no%21%27%29%3C/script%3E
If the attacker then convinced a victim user to visit this page, a script of the attacker's choosing would run on the page. Such a script could do any number of hostile actions, limited only by what the site offers: if the site is an e-commerce shop, for instance, such a script could cause the user to unknowingly make arbitrarily many unwanted purchases.
This is called a cross-site scripting attack.
There are many constructs that can be used to try to trick a site into executing code. Here are some that authors are encouraged to consider when writing safelist filters:
img, it is important to safelist
any provided attributes as well. If one allowed all attributes then an attacker could, for
instance, use the onload attribute to run arbitrary
script.javascript:", but user agents can
implement (and indeed, have historically implemented) others.base element to be inserted means any script elements
in the page with relative links can be hijacked, and similarly that any form submissions can
get redirected to a hostile site.If a site allows a user to make form submissions with user-specific side-effects, for example posting messages on a forum under the user's name, making purchases, or applying for a passport, it is important to verify that the request was made by the user intentionally, rather than by another site tricking the user into making the request unknowingly.
This problem exists because HTML forms can be submitted to other origins.
Sites can prevent such attacks by populating forms with user-specific hidden tokens, or by
checking `Origin` headers on all requests.
A page that provides users with an interface to perform actions that the user might not wish to perform needs to be designed so as to avoid the possibility that users can be tricked into activating the interface.
One way that a user could be so tricked is if a hostile site places the victim site in a
small iframe and then convinces the user to click, for instance by having the user
play a reaction game. Once the user is playing the game, the hostile site can quickly position
the iframe under the mouse cursor just as the user is about to click, thus tricking the user
into clicking the victim site's interface.
To avoid this, sites that do not expect to be used in frames are encouraged to only enable
their interface if they detect that they are not in a frame (e.g. by comparing the window object to the value of the top
attribute).
This section is non-normative.
Scripts in HTML have "run-to-completion" semantics, meaning that the browser will generally run the script uninterrupted before doing anything else, such as firing further events or continuing to parse the document.
On the other hand, parsing of HTML files happens incrementally, meaning that the parser can pause at any point to let scripts run. This is generally a good thing, but it does mean that authors need to be careful to avoid hooking event handlers after the events could have possibly fired.
There are two techniques for doing this reliably: use event handler content attributes, or create the element and add the event handlers in the same script. The latter is safe because, as mentioned earlier, scripts are run to completion before further events can fire.
One way this could manifest itself is with img elements and the load event. The event could fire as soon as the element has been
parsed, especially if the image has already been cached (which is common).
Here, the author uses the onload handler on an
img element to catch the load event:
< img src = "games.png" alt = "Games" onload = "gamesLogoHasLoaded(event)" > If the element is being added by script, then so long as the event handlers are added in the same script, the event will still not be missed:
< script >
var img = new Image();
img. src = 'games.png' ;
img. alt = 'Games' ;
img. onload = gamesLogoHasLoaded;
// img.addEventListener('load', gamesLogoHasLoaded, false); // would work also
</ script > However, if the author first created the img element and then in a separate
script added the event listeners, there's a chance that the load
event would be fired in between, leading it to be missed:
<!-- Do not use this style, it has a race condition! -->
< img id = "games" src = "games.png" alt = "Games" >
<!-- the 'load' event might fire here while the parser is taking a
break, in which case you will not see it! -->
< script >
var img = document. getElementById( 'games' );
img. onload = gamesLogoHasLoaded; // might never fire!
</ script > This section is non-normative.
Authors are encouraged to make use of conformance checkers (also known as validators) to catch common mistakes. The WHATWG maintains a list of such tools at: https://whatwg.org/validator/
This section is non-normative.
Unlike previous versions of the HTML specification, this specification defines in some detail the required processing for invalid documents as well as valid documents.
However, even though the processing of invalid content is in most cases well-defined, conformance requirements for documents are still important: in practice, interoperability (the situation in which all implementations process particular content in a reliable and identical or equivalent way) is not the only goal of document conformance requirements. This section details some of the more common reasons for still distinguishing between a conforming document and one with errors.
This section is non-normative.
The majority of presentational features from previous versions of HTML are no longer allowed. Presentational markup in general has been found to have a number of problems:
While it is possible to use presentational markup in a way that provides users of assistive technologies (ATs) with an acceptable experience (e.g. using ARIA), doing so is significantly more difficult than doing so when using semantically-appropriate markup. Furthermore, even using such techniques doesn't help make pages accessible for non-AT non-graphical users, such as users of text-mode browsers.
Using media-independent markup, on the other hand, provides an easy way for documents to be authored in such a way that they work for more users (e.g. users of text browsers).
It is significantly easier to maintain a site written in such a way that the markup is
style-independent. For example, changing the color of a site that uses <font color=""> throughout requires changes across the entire site,
whereas a similar change to a site based on CSS can be done by changing a single file.
Presentational markup tends to be much more redundant, and thus results in larger document sizes.
For those reasons, presentational markup has been removed from HTML in this version. This change should not come as a surprise; HTML4 deprecated presentational markup many years ago and provided a mode (HTML4 Transitional) to help authors move away from presentational markup; later, XHTML 1.1 went further and obsoleted those features altogether.
The only remaining presentational markup features in HTML are the style attribute and the style element. Use of the style attribute is somewhat discouraged in production environments, but
it can be useful for rapid prototyping (where its rules can be directly moved into a separate
style sheet later) and for providing specific styles in unusual cases where a separate style sheet
would be inconvenient. Similarly, the style element can be useful in syndication or
for page-specific styles, but in general an external style sheet is likely to be more convenient
when the styles apply to multiple pages.
It is also worth noting that some elements that were previously presentational have been
redefined in this specification to be media-independent: b, i,
hr, s, small, and u.
This section is non-normative.
The syntax of HTML is constrained to avoid a wide variety of problems.
Certain invalid syntax constructs, when parsed, result in DOM trees that are highly unintuitive.
To allow user agents to be used in controlled environments without having to implement the more bizarre and convoluted error handling rules, user agents are permitted to fail whenever encountering a parse error.
Some error-handling behavior, such as the behavior for the <table><hr>... example mentioned above, are incompatible with streaming
user agents (user agents that process HTML files in one pass, without storing state). To avoid
interoperability problems with such user agents, any syntax resulting in such behavior is
considered invalid.
When a user agent based on XML is connected to an HTML parser, it is possible that certain invariants that XML enforces, such as element or attribute names never contain multiple colons, will be violated by an HTML file. Handling this can require that the parser coerce the HTML DOM into an XML-compatible infoset. Most syntax constructs that require such handling are considered invalid. (Comments containing two consecutive hyphens, or ending with a hyphen, are exceptions that are allowed in the HTML syntax.)
Certain syntax constructs can result in disproportionately poor performance. To discourage the use of such constructs, they are typically made non-conforming.
For example, the following markup results in poor performance, since all the unclosed
i elements have to be reconstructed in each paragraph, resulting in progressively
more elements in each paragraph:
< p >< i > She dreamt.
< p >< i > She dreamt that she ate breakfast.
< p >< i > Then lunch.
< p >< i > And finally dinner.The resulting DOM for this fragment would be:
There are syntax constructs that, for historical reasons, are relatively fragile. To help reduce the number of users who accidentally run into such problems, they are made non-conforming.
For example, the parsing of certain named character references in attributes happens even with the closing semicolon being omitted. It is safe to include an ampersand followed by letters that do not form a named character reference, but if the letters are changed to a string that does form a named character reference, they will be interpreted as that character instead.
In this fragment, the attribute's value is "?bill&ted":
< a href = "?bill&ted" > Bill and Ted</ a > In the following fragment, however, the attribute's value is actually "?art©", not the intended "?art©",
because even without the final semicolon, "©" is handled the same
as "©" and thus gets interpreted as "©":
< a href = "?art©" > Art and Copy</ a > To avoid this problem, all named character references are required to end with a semicolon, and uses of named character references without a semicolon are flagged as errors.
Thus, the correct way to express the above cases is as follows:
< a href = "?bill&ted" > Bill and Ted</ a > <!-- &ted is ok, since it's not a named character reference --> < a href = "?art&copy" > Art and Copy</ a > <!-- the & has to be escaped, since © is a named character reference --> Certain syntax constructs are known to cause especially subtle or serious problems in legacy user agents, and are therefore marked as non-conforming to help authors avoid them.
For example, this is why the U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT character (`) is not allowed in unquoted attributes. In certain legacy user agents, it is sometimes treated as a quote character.
Another example of this is the DOCTYPE, which is required to trigger no-quirks mode, because the behavior of legacy user agents in quirks mode is often largely undocumented.
Certain restrictions exist purely to avoid known security problems.
For example, the restriction on using UTF-7 exists purely to avoid authors falling prey to a known cross-site-scripting attack using UTF-7. [UTF7]
Markup where the author's intent is very unclear is often made non-conforming. Correcting these errors early makes later maintenance easier.
When a user makes a simple typo, it is helpful if the error can be caught early, as this can save the author a lot of debugging time. This specification therefore usually considers it an error to use element names, attribute names, and so forth, that do not match the names defined in this specification.
For example, if the author typed <capton> instead of <caption>, this would be flagged as an error and the author could correct
the typo immediately.
In order to allow the language syntax to be extended in the future, certain otherwise harmless features are disallowed.
For example, "attributes" in end tags are ignored currently, but they are invalid, in case a future change to the language makes use of that syntax feature without conflicting with already-deployed (and valid!) content.
Some authors find it helpful to be in the practice of always quoting all attributes and always including all optional tags, preferring the consistency derived from such custom over the minor benefits of terseness afforded by making use of the flexibility of the HTML syntax. To aid such authors, conformance checkers can provide modes of operation wherein such conventions are enforced.
This section is non-normative.
Beyond the syntax of the language, this specification also places restrictions on how elements and attributes can be specified. These restrictions are present for similar reasons:
To avoid misuse of elements with defined meanings, content models are defined that restrict how elements can be nested when such nestings would be of dubious value.
For example, this specification disallows nesting a section
element inside a kbd element, since it is highly unlikely for an author to indicate
that an entire section should be keyed in.
Similarly, to draw the author's attention to mistakes in the use of elements, clear contradictions in the semantics expressed are also considered conformance errors.
In the fragments below, for example, the semantics are nonsensical: a separator cannot simultaneously be a cell, nor can a radio button be a progress bar.
< hr role = "cell" > < input type = radio role = progressbar > Another example is the restrictions on the content models of the
ul element, which only allows li element children. Lists by definition
consist just of zero or more list items, so if a ul element contains something
other than an li element, it's not clear what was meant.
Certain elements have default styles or behaviors that make certain combinations likely to lead to confusion. Where these have equivalent alternatives without this problem, the confusing combinations are disallowed.
For example, div elements are rendered as block boxes, and span elements as inline boxes. Putting a block box in an
inline box is unnecessarily confusing; since either nesting just div
elements, or nesting just span elements, or nesting span elements
inside div elements all serve the same purpose as nesting a div
element in a span element, but only the latter involves a block box in
an inline box, the latter combination is disallowed.
Another example would be the way interactive content cannot be
nested. For example, a button element cannot contain a textarea
element. This is because the default behavior of such nesting interactive elements would be
highly confusing to users. Instead of nesting these elements, they can be placed side by
side.
Sometimes, something is disallowed because allowing it would likely cause author confusion.
For example, setting the disabled
attribute to the value "false" is disallowed, because despite the
appearance of meaning that the element is enabled, it in fact means that the element is
disabled (what matters for implementations is the presence of the attribute, not its
value).
Some conformance errors simplify the language that authors need to learn.
For example, the area element's shape attribute, despite accepting both circ and circle values in practice as synonyms, disallows
the use of the circ value, so as to simplify
tutorials and other learning aids. There would be no benefit to allowing both, but it would
cause extra confusion when teaching the language.
Certain elements are parsed in somewhat eccentric ways (typically for historical reasons), and their content model restrictions are intended to avoid exposing the author to these issues.
For example, a form element isn't allowed inside phrasing content,
because when parsed as HTML, a form element's start tag will imply a
p element's end tag. Thus, the following markup results in two paragraphs, not one:
< p > Welcome. < form >< label > Name:</ label > < input ></ form > It is parsed exactly like the following:
< p > Welcome. </ p >< form >< label > Name:</ label > < input ></ form > Some errors are intended to help prevent script problems that would be hard to debug.
This is why, for instance, it is non-conforming to have two id attributes with the same value. Duplicate IDs lead to the wrong
element being selected, with sometimes disastrous effects whose cause is hard to determine.
Some constructs are disallowed because historically they have been the cause of a lot of wasted authoring time, and by encouraging authors to avoid making them, authors can save time in future efforts.
For example, a script element's src attribute causes the element's contents to be ignored.
However, this isn't obvious, especially if the element's contents appear to be executable script
— which can lead to authors spending a lot of time trying to debug the inline script
without realizing that it is not executing. To reduce this problem, this specification makes it
non-conforming to have executable script in a script element when the src attribute is present. This means that authors who are
validating their documents are less likely to waste time with this kind of mistake.
Some authors like to write files that can be interpreted as both XML and HTML with similar results. Though this practice is discouraged in general due to the myriad of subtle complications involved (especially when involving scripting, styling, or any kind of automated serialization), this specification has a few restrictions intended to at least somewhat mitigate the difficulties. This makes it easier for authors to use this as a transitionary step when migrating between the HTML and XML syntaxes.
For example, there are somewhat complicated rules surrounding the lang and xml:lang attributes
intended to keep the two synchronized.
Another example would be the restrictions on the values of xmlns attributes in the HTML serialization, which are intended to ensure that
elements in conforming documents end up in the same namespaces whether processed as HTML or
XML.
As with the restrictions on the syntax intended to allow for new syntax in future revisions of the language, some restrictions on the content models of elements and values of attributes are intended to allow for future expansion of the HTML vocabulary.
For example, limiting the values of the target attribute that start with an U+005F LOW LINE
character (_) to only specific predefined values allows new predefined values to be introduced
at a future time without conflicting with author-defined values.
Certain restrictions are intended to support the restrictions made by other specifications.
For example, requiring that attributes that take media query lists use only valid media query lists reinforces the importance of following the conformance rules of that specification.
This section is non-normative.
The following documents might be of interest to readers of this specification.
This Architectural Specification provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web, building on the Universal Character Set, defined jointly by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. Topics addressed include use of the terms 'character', 'encoding' and 'string', a reference processing model, choice and identification of character encodings, character escaping, and string indexing.
Because Unicode contains such a large number of characters and incorporates the varied writing systems of the world, incorrect usage can expose programs or systems to possible security attacks. This is especially important as more and more products are internationalized. This document describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account, and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your web content more usable to users in general.
This specification provides guidelines for designing web content authoring tools that are more accessible for people with disabilities. An authoring tool that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility by providing an accessible user interface to authors with disabilities as well as by enabling, supporting, and promoting the production of accessible web content by all authors.
This document provides guidelines for designing user agents that lower barriers to web accessibility for people with disabilities. User agents include browsers and other types of software that retrieve and render web content. A user agent that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility through its own user interface and through other internal facilities, including its ability to communicate with other technologies (especially assistive technologies). Furthermore, all users, not just users with disabilities, should find conforming user agents to be more usable.