CGI.pm and XHTML

Ovid has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

From perldoc CGI

By default, CGI.pm versions 2.69 and higher emit XHTML (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/). The -no_xhtml pragma disables this feature. Thanks to Michalis Kabrianis <kabrianis@hellug.gr> for this feature.

I am using CGI.pm version 2.74.

Here's the program:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use CGI::Pretty qw( :standard );

print header,
      start_html( -title   => 'Password Check',
                  -BGCOLOR => 'navy',
                  -text    => 'white' ),
      h1( 'It worked' ),
      hr(),
      br(),
      end_html;
[download]

Here's the output:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
        "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US"><head><title>P
+assword Check</title>
</head><body text="white" bgcolor="navy">
<h1>
        It worked
</h1>
<hr><br></body></html>
[download]

According to the w3c spec (see section 4.6, "Empty Elements):

Empty elements must either have an end tag or the start tag must end with />. For instance, <br/> or <hr></hr>.

Unfortunately, the hr and br tags output by the CGI.pm HTML functions aren't valid XHTML. Is this a bug or is it a feature of transitional XHTML? Do others have this issue?

Cheers,
Ovid

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Comment on CGI.pm and XHTML Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CGI.pm and XHTML by mirod (Canon) on Mar 28, 2001 at 17:16 UTC
According to XHTML it should be `<br />` or `<br></br>` and it is with `use CGI`. The problem seems to be with CGI::Pretty. I guess you found a bug there.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
(Ovid) Re(2): CGI.pm and XHTML by Ovid (Cardinal) on Mar 28, 2001 at 17:59 UTC
Yup, it's a bug with CGI::Pretty. Sigh. There was a bug in $CGI::VERSION 2.46 with CGI::Pretty that was stripping the attributes of HTML tags. Yet another reason to avoid CGI::Pretty. Thanks! Cheers, Ovid Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.	[reply]
Re: CGI.pm and XHTML by kal (Hermit) on Mar 28, 2001 at 17:47 UTC
It may be a bug - in my copy, the lines: `if ($linebreak) { $break = $XHTML ? "<br />" : "<br>"; }` [download] .. appear, so they know about this already, it's in version 2.752 (what I got here). Perhaps you need to upgrade CGI.pm?	[reply] [d/l]
Re: CGI.pm and XHTML by j.a.p.h. (Pilgrim) on Mar 28, 2001 at 18:31 UTC
Note that at least with IE 5.01 SP 2 and XHTML Transitional, an empty <title /> element will cause the page not to render. I was almost pulling my hair out trying to hunt down that one.	[reply]
Re: CGI.pm and XHTML by little (Curate) on Mar 29, 2001 at 02:07 UTC
CGI.pm does also omit the trailing slash (best after a space to be best recognised by browsers) before the tag closes. but forget it, it's late and I'm tired.	[reply]

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