Tag query

[rblah]

Do you know if it's valid to have spaces between the start of a tag and
the tag's text? For example, would < a
href="http://www.kuro5hin.org" > be valid?

If at all possible, a reference to W3C would be great!

 

[Hywel]

Do you know if it's valid to have spaces between the start of a tag and
the tag's text? For example, would < a
href="http://www.kuro5hin.org" > be valid?

You could try validating this at
http://validator.w3.org/
and get the answer for yourself.

If at all possible, a reference to W3C would be great!

http://www.w3c.org/

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Do you know if it's valid to have spaces between the start of a tag
and the tag's text? For example, would < a
href="http://www.kuro5hin.org" > be valid?

It is valid (in HTML), but there is no tag in it, just text data.

The "<" is recognized as starting a tag only when immediately followed
by a name start character (a letter) or by "/". Otherwise it is taken as
a data.

If at all possible, a reference to W3C would be great!

Unfortunately the material at W3C doesn't really describe the details of
HTML syntax at the lexical level very well. It generally refers to the
SGML standard (and, in XHTML specs, the XML specification), and makes
quite some handwaving in referring to some SGML features as not commonly
implemented. But in _this_ issue, browsers behave according to the SGML
standard, because it corresponds to how a naive programmer would
implement tag recognition.