Question

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.

• http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/10/shorttags.html
• http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.7
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/702222/107152

Answer 1

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.”