HTML 5

Abstract

This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.

Status of this document

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the most recently formally published revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.

If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please send them to public-html-comments@w3.org (subscribe, archives) or submit them using our public bug database. All feedback is welcome.

The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft does not imply that all of the participants in the W3C HTML working group endorse the contents of the specification.

The W3C HTML Working Group is the W3C working group responsible for this specification's progress along the W3C Recommendation track. This specification is the 12 February 2009 Working Draft.

This specification is intended to replace (be a new version of) what was previously the HTML4, XHTML 1.0, and DOM2 HTML specifications.

This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.

Table of contents

Introduction

This section is non-normative.

The World Wide Web (Web) is a network of information resources. The Web relies on five principal mechanisms to make these resources available:

1. URIs, a uniform naming scheme for locating resources on the Web.
2. HTTP, for access to named resources over the Web.
3. HTML hypertext, for easy navigation among resources.
4. CSS styling, for presentation queues.
5. ECMAScript programs, for client-side processing of resources.

The ties between these five mechanisms are apparent throughout this specification.

This document has been written with two types of readers in mind: authors and implementors.

This specification is divided into the following major sections:

Common Infrastructure

The conformance classes, algorithms, definitions, and the common underpinnings of the rest of the specification.

The DOM

Documents are built from elements. These elements form a tree using the DOM (Document Object Model). This section defines the features of this DOM, as well as introducing the features common to all elements, and the concepts used in defining elements.

Elements

Each element has a predefined meaning, which is explained in this section. User agent requirements for how to handle each element are also given, along with rules for authors on how to use the element.

Web Browsers

HTML documents do not exist in a vacuum — this section defines many of the features that affect environments that deal with multiple pages, links between pages, and running scripts.

User Interaction

HTML documents can provide a number of mechanisms for users to interact with and modify content, which are described in this section.

The Language Syntax

All of these features would be for naught if they couldn't be represented in a serialized form and sent to other people, and so this section defines the syntax of HTML, along with rules for how to parse HTML.

There are also a couple of appendices, defining rendering rules for Web browsers and listing areas that are out of scope for this specification.

Typographic conventions

This is a definition, requirement, or explanation.

This is a note.

This is an example.

This is an open issue.

This is a warning.

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.

interface Example {
  // this is an IDL definition
};

Common infrastructure

Terminology

This specification refers to both HTML and XML attributes and DOM attributes, often in the same context. When it is not clear which is being referred to, they are referred to as content attributes for HTML and XML attributes, and DOM attributes for those from the DOM. Similarly, the term "properties" is used for both ECMAScript object properties and CSS properties. When these are ambiguous they are qualified as object properties and CSS properties respectively.

The term HTML documents is sometimes used in contrast with XML documents to specifically mean documents that were parsed using an HTML parser (as opposed to using an XML parser or created purely through the DOM).

Generally, when the specification states that a feature applies to HTML or XHTML, it also includes the other. When a feature specifically only applies to one of the two languages, it is called out by explicitly stating that it does not apply to the other format, as in "for HTML, ... (this does not apply to XHTML)".

This specification uses the term document to refer to any use of HTML, ranging from short static documents to long essays or reports with rich multimedia, as well as to fully-fledged interactive applications.

For simplicity, terms such as shown, displayed, and visible might sometimes be used when referring to the way a document is rendered to the user. These terms are not meant to imply a visual medium; they must be considered to apply to other media in equivalent ways.

Some of the algorithms in this specification, for historical reasons, require the user agent to pause until some condition has been met. While a user agent is paused, it must ensure that no scripts execute (e.g. no event handlers, no timers, etc). User agents should remain responsive to user input while paused, however, albeit without letting the user interact with Web pages where that would involve invoking any script.

XML

To ease migration from HTML to XHTML, UAs conforming to this specification will place elements in HTML in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, at least for the purposes of the DOM and CSS. The term "elements in the HTML namespace", or "HTML elements" for short, when used in this specification, thus refers to both HTML and XHTML elements.

Unless otherwise stated, all elements defined or mentioned in this specification are in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, and all attributes defined or mentioned in this specification have no namespace (they are in the per-element partition).

When an XML name, such as an attribute or element name, is referred to in the form prefix:localName, as in xml:id or svg:rect, it refers to a name with the local name localName and the namespace given by the prefix, as defined by the following table:

xml

http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace

html

http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml

svg

http://www.w3.org/2000/svg

Attribute names are said to be XML-compatible if they match the Name production defined in XML, they contain no U+003A COLON (:) characters, and their first three characters are not an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "xml". [XML]

DOM trees

The term root element, when not explicitly qualified as referring to the document's root element, means the furthest ancestor element node of whatever node is being discussed, or the node itself if it has no ancestors. When the node is a part of the document, then that is indeed the document's root element; however, if the node is not currently part of the document tree, the root element will be an orphaned node.

A node's home subtree is the subtree rooted at that node's root element.

The Document of a Node (such as an element) is the Document that the Node's ownerDocument DOM attribute returns.

An element is said to have been inserted into a document when its root element changes and is now the document's root element. If a Node is in a Document then that Document is always the Node's Document, and the Node's ownerDocument DOM attribute thus always returns that Document.

The term tree order means a pre-order, depth-first traversal of DOM nodes involved (through the parentNode/childNodes relationship).

When it is stated that some element or attribute is ignored, or treated as some other value, or handled as if it was something else, this refers only to the processing of the node after it is in the DOM. A user agent must not mutate the DOM in such situations.

The term text node refers to any Text node, including CDATASection nodes; specifically, any Node with node type TEXT_NODE (3) or CDATA_SECTION_NODE (4). [DOM3CORE]

Scripting

The construction "a Foo object", where Foo is actually an interface, is sometimes used instead of the more accurate "an object implementing the interface Foo".

A DOM attribute is said to be getting when its value is being retrieved (e.g. by author script), and is said to be setting when a new value is assigned to it.

If a DOM object is said to be live, then that means that any attributes returning that object must always return the same object (not a new object each time), and the attributes and methods on that object must operate on the actual underlying data, not a snapshot of the data.

The terms fire and dispatch are used interchangeably in the context of events, as in the DOM Events specifications. [DOM3EVENTS]

Plugins

The term plugin is used to mean any content handler, typically a third-party content handler, for Web content types that are not supported by the user agent natively, or for content types that do not expose a DOM, that supports rendering the content as part of the user agent's interface.

One example of a plugin would be a PDF viewer that is instantiated in a browsing context when the user navigates to a PDF file. This would count as a plugin regardless of whether the party that implemented the PDF viewer component was the same as that which implemented the user agent itself. However, a PDF viewer application that launches separate from the user agent (as opposed to using the same interface) is not a plugin by this definition.

This specification does not define a mechanism for interacting with plugins, as it is expected to be user-agent- and platform-specific. Some UAs might opt to support a plugin mechanism such as the Netscape Plugin API; others might use remote content converters or have built-in support for certain types. [NPAPI]

Character encodings

An ASCII-compatible character encoding is one that is a superset of US-ASCII (specifically, ANSI_X3.4-1968) for bytes in the set 0x09, 0x0A, 0x0C, 0x0D, 0x20 - 0x22, 0x26, 0x27, 0x2C - 0x3F, 0x41 - 0x5A, and 0x61 - 0x7A.

Conformance requirements

All diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative, as are all sections explicitly marked non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC2119. For readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters in this specification. [RFC2119]

Requirements phrased in the imperative as part of algorithms (such as "strip any leading space characters" or "return false and abort these steps") are to be interpreted with the meaning of the key word ("must", "should", "may", etc) used in introducing the algorithm.

This specification describes the conformance criteria for user agents (relevant to implementors) and documents (relevant to authors and authoring tool implementors).

Some conformance requirements are phrased as requirements on elements, attributes, methods or objects. Such requirements fall into two categories: those describing content model restrictions, and those describing implementation behavior. The former category of requirements are requirements on documents and authoring tools. The second category are requirements on user agents.

Conformance requirements phrased as algorithms or specific steps may be implemented in any manner, so long as the end result is equivalent. (In particular, the algorithms defined in this specification are intended to be easy to follow, and not intended to be performant.)

For compatibility with existing content and prior specifications, this specification describes two authoring formats: one based on XML (referred to as XHTML5), and one using a custom format inspired by SGML (referred to as HTML5). Implementations may support only one of these two formats, although supporting both is encouraged.

XHTML documents (XML documents using elements from the HTML namespace) that use the new features described in this specification and that are served over the wire (e.g. by HTTP) must be sent using an XML MIME type such as application/xml or application/xhtml+xml and must not be served as text/html. [RFC3023]

HTML documents, if they are served over the wire (e.g. by HTTP) must be labeled with the text/html MIME type.

The language in this specification assumes that the user agent expands all entity references, and therefore does not include entity reference nodes in the DOM. If user agents do include entity reference nodes in the DOM, then user agents must handle them as if they were fully expanded when implementing this specification. For example, if a requirement talks about an element's child text nodes, then any text nodes that are children of an entity reference that is a child of that element would be used as well. Entity references to unknown entities must be treated as if they contained just an empty text node for the purposes of the algorithms defined in this specification.

Dependencies

This specification relies on several other underlying specifications.

DOM

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a representation — a model — of a document and its content. The DOM is not just an API; the conformance criteria of HTML implementations are defined, in this specification, in terms of operations on the DOM. [DOM3CORE]

Implementations must support some version of DOM Core and DOM Events, because this specification is defined in terms of the DOM, and some of the features are defined as extensions to the DOM Core interfaces. [DOM3CORE] [DOM3EVENTS]

ECMAScript

The IDL fragments in this specification must be interpreted as required for conforming IDL fragments, as described in the Web IDL specification. [WebIDL]

Media Queries

Implementations must support some version of the Media Queries language. [MQ]

XML

Implementations that support XHTML5 must support some version of XML, as well as its corresponding namespaces specification, because XHTML5 uses an XML serialization with namespaces. [XML] [XMLNAMES]

This specification does not require support of any particular network transport protocols, style sheet language, scripting language, or any of the DOM and WebAPI specifications beyond those described above. However, the language described by this specification is biased towards CSS as the styling language, ECMAScript as the scripting language, and HTTP as the network protocol, and several features assume that those languages and protocols are in use.

This specification might have certain additional requirements on character encodings, image formats, audio formats, and video formats in the respective sections.

Case-sensitivity and string comparison

This specification defines several comparison operators for strings.

Comparing two strings in a case-sensitive manner means comparing them exactly, codepoint for codepoint.

Comparing two strings in an ASCII case-insensitive manner means comparing them exactly, codepoint for codepoint, except that the characters in the range U+0041 .. U+005A (i.e. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z) and the corresponding characters in the range U+0061 .. U+007A (i.e. LATIN SMALL LETTER A to LATIN SMALL LETTER Z) are considered to also match.

Comparing two strings in a compatibility caseless manner means using the Unicode compatibility caseless match operation to compare the two strings. [UNICODECASE]

Converting a string to uppercase means replacing all characters in the range U+0061 .. U+007A (i.e. LATIN SMALL LETTER A to LATIN SMALL LETTER Z) with the corresponding characters in the range U+0041 .. U+005A (i.e. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z).

Converting a string to lowercase means replacing all characters in the range U+0041 .. U+005A (i.e. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z) with the corresponding characters in the range U+0061 .. U+007A (i.e. LATIN SMALL LETTER A to LATIN SMALL LETTER Z).

A string pattern is a prefix match for a string s when pattern is not longer than s and truncating s to pattern's length leaves the two strings as matches of each other.

Common microsyntaxes

There are various places in HTML that accept particular data types, such as dates or numbers. This section describes what the conformance criteria for content in those formats is, and how to parse them.

Need to go through the whole spec and make sure all the attribute values are clearly defined either in terms of microsyntaxes or in terms of other specs, or as "Text" or some such.

Common parser idioms

The space characters, for the purposes of this specification, are U+0020 SPACE, U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION (tab), U+000A LINE FEED (LF), U+000C FORM FEED (FF), and U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR).

The White_Space characters are those that have the Unicode property "White_Space". [UNICODE]

Some of the micro-parsers described below follow the pattern of having an input variable that holds the string being parsed, and having a position variable pointing at the next character to parse in input.

For parsers based on this pattern, a step that requires the user agent to collect a sequence of characters means that the following algorithm must be run, with characters being the set of characters that can be collected:

1. Let input and position be the same variables as those of the same name in the algorithm that invoked these steps.

2. Let result be the empty string.

3. While position doesn't point past the end of input and the character at position is one of the characters, append that character to the end of result and advance position to the next character in input.

4. Return result.

The step skip whitespace means that the user agent must collect a sequence of characters that are space characters. The step skip White_Space characters means that the user agent must collect a sequence of characters that are White_Space characters. In both cases, the collected characters are not used. [UNICODE]

When a user agent is to strip line breaks from a string, the user agent must remove any U+000A LINE FEED (LF) and U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) characters from that string.

The codepoint length of a string is the number of Unicode codepoints in that string.

Boolean attributes

A number of attributes in HTML5 are boolean attributes. The presence of a boolean attribute on an element represents the true value, and the absence of the attribute represents the false value.

If the attribute is present, its value must either be the empty string or a value that is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the attribute's canonical name, with no leading or trailing whitespace.

The values "true" and "false" are not allowed on boolean attributes. To represent a false value, the attribute has to be omitted altogether.

Numbers

Non-negative integers

A string is a valid non-negative integer if it consists of one of more characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9).

A valid non-negative integer represents the number that is represented in base ten by that string of digits.

The rules for parsing non-negative integers are as given in the following algorithm. When invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns a value. This algorithm will either return zero, a positive integer, or an error. Leading spaces are ignored. Trailing spaces and indeed any trailing garbage characters are ignored.

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

3. Let value have the value 0.

4. Skip whitespace.

5. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

6. If the next character is a U+002B PLUS SIGN character (+), advance position to the next character.

7. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

8. If the next character is not one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), then return an error.

9. If the next character is one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9):

   1. Multiply value by ten.
   2. Add the value of the current character (0..9) to value.
   3. Advance position to the next character.
   4. If position is not past the end of input, return to the top of step 7 in the overall algorithm (that's the step within which these substeps find themselves).

10. Return value.

Signed integers

A string is a valid integer if it consists of one of more characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), optionally prefixed with a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character.

A valid integer without a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") prefix represents the number that is represented in base ten by that string of digits. A valid integer with a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") prefix represents the number represented in base ten by the string of digits that follows the U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, subtracted from zero.

The rules for parsing integers are similar to the rules for non-negative integers, and are as given in the following algorithm. When invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns a value. This algorithm will either return an integer or an error. Leading spaces are ignored. Trailing spaces and trailing garbage characters are ignored.

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

3. Let value have the value 0.

4. Let sign have the value "positive".

5. Skip whitespace.

6. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

7. If the character indicated by position (the first character) is a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character:

   1. Let sign be "negative".
   2. Advance position to the next character.
   3. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

8. If the next character is not one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), then return an error.

9. If the next character is one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9):

   1. Multiply value by ten.
   2. Add the value of the current character (0..9) to value.
   3. Advance position to the next character.
   4. If position is not past the end of input, return to the top of step 9 in the overall algorithm (that's the step within which these substeps find themselves).

10. If sign is "positive", return value, otherwise return 0-value.

Real numbers

A string is a valid floating point number if it consists of:

1. Optionally, a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character.
2. A series of one or more characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9).
3. Optionally:
   1. A single U+002E FULL STOP (".") character.
   2. A series of one or more characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9).
4. Optionally:
   1. Either a U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E character or a U+0045 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E character.
   2. Optionally, a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character or U+002B PLUS SIGN ("+") character.
   3. A series of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9).

A valid floating point number represents the number obtained by multiplying the significand by ten raised to the power of the exponent, where the significand is the first number, interpreted as base ten (including the decimal point and the number after the decimal point, if any, and interpreting the significand as a negative number if the whole string starts with a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character and the number is not zero), and where the exponent is the number after the E, if any (interpreted as a negative number if there is a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character between the E and the number and the number is not zero, or else ignoring a U+002B PLUS SIGN ("+") character between the E and the number if there is one). If there is no E, then the exponent is treated as zero.

The values ±Infinity and NaN are not valid floating point numbers.

The best representation of the floating point number n is the string obtained from applying the ECMAScript operator ToString to n.

The rules for parsing floating point number values are as given in the following algorithm. As with the previous algorithms, when this one is invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns something. This algorithm will either return a number or an error. Leading spaces are ignored. Trailing spaces and garbage characters are ignored.

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

3. Let value have the value 1.

4. Let divisor have the value 1.

5. Let exponent have the value 1.

6. Skip whitespace.

7. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

8. If the character indicated by position is a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character:

   1. Change value and divisor to −1.
   2. Advance position to the next character.
   3. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

9. If the character indicated by position is not one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), then return an error.

10. Collect a sequence of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), and interpret the resulting sequence as a base-ten integer. Multiply value by that integer.

11. If position is past the end of input, return value.

12. If the character indicated by position is a U+002E FULL STOP ("."), run these substeps:

    1. Advance position to the next character.

    2. If position is past the end of input, or if the character indicated by position is not one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), then return value.

    3. Fraction loop: Multiply divisor by ten.

    4. Add the value of the current character interpreted as a base-ten digit (0..9) divided by divisor, to value.

    5. Advance position to the next character.

    6. If position is past the end of input, then return value.

    7. If the character indicated by position is one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), return to the step labeled fraction loop in these substeps.

13. If the character indicated by position is a U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E character or a U+0045 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E character, run these substeps:

    1. Advance position to the next character.

    2. If position is past the end of input, then return value.

    3. If the character indicated by position is a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-") character:

       1. Change exponent to −1.
       2. Advance position to the next character.

       3. If position is past the end of input, then return value.

       Otherwise, if the character indicated by position is a U+002B PLUS SIGN ("+") character:

       1. Advance position to the next character.

       2. If position is past the end of input, then return value.

    4. If the character indicated by position is not one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), then return value.

    5. Collect a sequence of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), and interpret the resulting sequence as a base-ten integer. Multiply exponent by that integer.

    6. Multiply value by ten raised to the exponentth power.

14. Return value.

Ratios

The algorithms described in this section are used by the progress and meter elements.

A valid denominator punctuation character is one of the characters from the table below. There is a value associated with each denominator punctuation character, as shown in the table below.

The steps for finding one or two numbers of a ratio in a string are as follows:

1. If the string is empty, then return nothing and abort these steps.
2. Find a number in the string according to the algorithm below, starting at the start of the string.
3. If the sub-algorithm in step 2 returned nothing or returned an error condition, return nothing and abort these steps.
4. Set number1 to the number returned by the sub-algorithm in step 2.
5. Starting with the character immediately after the last one examined by the sub-algorithm in step 2, skip all White_Space characters in the string (this might match zero characters).
6. If there are still further characters in the string, and the next character in the string is a valid denominator punctuation character, set denominator to that character.
7. If the string contains any other characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE, but denominator was given a value in the step 6, return nothing and abort these steps.
8. Otherwise, if denominator was given a value in step 6, return number1 and denominator and abort these steps.
9. Find a number in the string again, starting immediately after the last character that was examined by the sub-algorithm in step 2.
10. If the sub-algorithm in step 9 returned nothing or an error condition, return number1 and abort these steps.
11. Set number2 to the number returned by the sub-algorithm in step 9.
12. Starting with the character immediately after the last one examined by the sub-algorithm in step 9, skip all White_Space characters in the string (this might match zero characters).
13. If there are still further characters in the string, and the next character in the string is a valid denominator punctuation character, return nothing and abort these steps.
14. If the string contains any other characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE, return nothing and abort these steps.
15. Otherwise, return number1 and number2.

The algorithm to find a number is as follows. It is given a string and a starting position, and returns either nothing, a number, or an error condition.

1. Starting at the given starting position, ignore all characters in the given string until the first character that is either a U+002E FULL STOP or one of the ten characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE.
2. If there are no such characters, return nothing and abort these steps.
3. Starting with the character matched in step 1, collect all the consecutive characters that are either a U+002E FULL STOP or one of the ten characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE, and assign this string of one or more characters to string.
4. If string consists of just a single U+002E FULL STOP character or if it contains more than one U+002E FULL STOP character then return an error condition and abort these steps.
5. Parse string according to the rules for parsing floating point number values, to obtain number. This step cannot fail (string is guaranteed to be a valid floating point number).
6. Return number.

Percentages and lengths

The rules for parsing dimension values are as given in the following algorithm. When invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns a value. This algorithm will either return a number greater than or equal to 1.0, or an error; if a number is returned, then it is further categorised as either a percentage or a length.

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

3. Skip whitespace.

4. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

5. If the next character is a U+002B PLUS SIGN character (+), advance position to the next character.

6. Collect a sequence of characters that are U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) characters, and discard them.

7. If position is past the end of input, return an error.

8. If the next character is not one of U+0031 DIGIT ONE (1) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), then return an error.

9. Collect a sequence of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), and interpret the resulting sequence as a base-ten integer. Let value be that number.

10. If position is past the end of input, return value as an integer.

11. If the next character is a U+002E FULL STOP character (.):

    1. Advance position to the next character.

    2. If the next character is not one of U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), then return value as an integer.

    3. Collect a sequence of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9). Let length be the number of characters collected. Let fraction be the result of interpreting the collected characters as a base-ten integer, and then dividing that number by 10^length.

    4. Increment value by fraction.

12. If position is past the end of input, return value as a length.

13. If the next character is a U+0025 PERCENT SIGN character (%), return value as a percentage.

14. Return value as a length.

Lists of integers

A valid list of integers is a number of valid integers separated by U+002C COMMA characters, with no other characters (e.g. no space characters). In addition, there might be restrictions on the number of integers that can be given, or on the range of values allowed.

The rules for parsing a list of integers are as follows:

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

3. Let numbers be an initially empty list of integers. This list will be the result of this algorithm.

4. If there is a character in the string input at position position, and it is either a U+0020 SPACE, U+002C COMMA, or U+003B SEMICOLON character, then advance position to the next character in input, or to beyond the end of the string if there are no more characters.

5. If position points to beyond the end of input, return numbers and abort.

6. If the character in the string input at position position is a U+0020 SPACE, U+002C COMMA, or U+003B SEMICOLON character, then return to step 4.

7. Let negated be false.

8. Let value be 0.

9. Let started be false. This variable is set to true when the parser sees a number or a "-" character.

10. Let got number be false. This variable is set to true when the parser sees a number.

11. Let finished be false. This variable is set to true to switch parser into a mode where it ignores characters until the next separator.

12. Let bogus be false.

13. Parser: If the character in the string input at position position is:

    A U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS character

    Follow these substeps:

    1. If got number is true, let finished be true.
    2. If finished is true, skip to the next step in the overall set of steps.
    3. If started is true, let negated be false.
    4. Otherwise, if started is false and if bogus is false, let negated be true.
    5. Let started be true.

    A character in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE

    Follow these substeps:

    1. If finished is true, skip to the next step in the overall set of steps.
    2. Multiply value by ten.
    3. Add the value of the digit, interpreted in base ten, to value.
    4. Let started be true.
    5. Let got number be true.

    A U+0020 SPACE character

    A U+002C COMMA character

    A U+003B SEMICOLON character

    Follow these substeps:

    1. If got number is false, return the numbers list and abort. This happens if an entry in the list has no digits, as in "1,2,x,4".
    2. If negated is true, then negate value.
    3. Append value to the numbers list.
    4. Jump to step 4 in the overall set of steps.

    A character in the range U+0001 .. U+001F, U+0021 .. U+002B, U+002D .. U+002F, U+003A, U+003C .. U+0040, U+005B .. U+0060, U+007b .. U+007F (i.e. any other non-alphabetic ASCII character)

    Follow these substeps:

    1. If got number is true, let finished be true.
    2. If finished is true, skip to the next step in the overall set of steps.
    3. Let negated be false.

    Any other character

    Follow these substeps:

    1. If finished is true, skip to the next step in the overall set of steps.
    2. Let negated be false.
    3. Let bogus be true.
    4. If started is true, then return the numbers list, and abort. (The value in value is not appended to the list first; it is dropped.)

14. Advance position to the next character in input, or to beyond the end of the string if there are no more characters.

15. If position points to a character (and not to beyond the end of input), jump to the big Parser step above.

16. If negated is true, then negate value.

17. If got number is true, then append value to the numbers list.

18. Return the numbers list and abort.

Lists of dimensions

The rules for parsing a list of dimensions are as follows. These rules return a list of zero or more pairs consisting of a number and a unit, the unit being one of percentage, relative, and absolute.

1. Let raw input be the string being parsed.

2. If the last character in raw input is a U+002C COMMA character (","), then remove that character from raw input.

3. Split the string raw input on commas. Let raw tokens be the resulting list of tokens.

4. Let result be an empty list of number/unit pairs.

5. For each token in raw tokens, run the following substeps:

   1. Let input be the token.

   2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

   3. Let value be the number 0.

   4. Let unit be absolute.

   5. If position is past the end of input, set unit to relative and jump to the last substep.

   6. If the character at position is a character in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), collect a sequence of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), interpret the resulting sequence as an integer in base ten, and increment value by that integer.

   7. If the character at position is a U+002E FULL STOP character (.), run these substeps:

      1. Collect a sequence of characters consisting of space characters and characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) to U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9). Let s be the resulting sequence.

      2. Remove all space characters in s.

      3. If s is not the empty string, run these subsubsteps:

         1. Let length be the number of characters in s (after the spaces were removed).

         2. Let fraction be the result of interpreting s as a base-ten integer, and then dividing that number by 10^length.

         3. Increment value by fraction.

   8. Skip whitespace.

   9. If the character at position is a U+0025 PERCENT SIGN (%) character, then set unit to percentage.

      Otherwise, if the character at position is a U+002A ASTERISK character (*), then set unit to relative.

   10. Add an entry to result consisting of the number given by value and the unit given by unit.

6. Return the list result.

Colors

A simple color consists of three 8-bit numbers in the range 0..255, representing the red, green, and blue components of the color respectively, in the sRGB color space. [SRGB]

A string is a valid simple color if it is exactly seven characters long, and the first character is a U+0023 NUMBER SIGN (#) character, and the remaining six characters are all in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+0046 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F, U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A .. U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F, with the first two digits representing the red component, the middle two digits representing the green component, and the last two digits representing the blue component, in hexadecimal.

A string is a valid lowercase simple color if it is a valid simple color and doesn't use any characters in the range U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+0046 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F.

The rules for parsing simple color values are as given in the following algorithm. When invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns a value. This algorithm will either return a simple color or an error.

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. If input is not exactly seven characters long, then return an error.

3. If the first character in input is not a U+0023 NUMBER SIGN (#) character, then return an error.

4. If the last six characters of input are not all in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+0046 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F, U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A .. U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F, then return an error.

5. Let result be a simple color.

6. Interpret the second and third characters as a hexadecimal number and let the result be the red component of result.

7. Interpret the fourth and fifth characters as a hexadecimal number and let the result be the green component of result.

8. Interpret the sixth and seventh characters as a hexadecimal number and let the result be the blue component of result.

9. Return result.

The rules for serialising simple color values given a simple color are as given in the following algorithm:

1. Let result be a string consisting of a single U+0023 NUMBER SIGN (#) character.

2. Convert the red, green, and blue components in turn to two-digit hexadecimal numbers using the digits U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9) and U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A .. U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F, zero-padding if necessary, and append these numbers to result, in the order red, green, blue.

3. Return result, which will be a valid lowercase simple color.

Some obsolete legacy attributes parse colors in a more complicated manner, using the rules for parsing a legacy color value, which are given in the following algorithm. When invoked, the steps must be followed in the order given, aborting at the first step that returns a value. This algorithm will either return a simple color or an error.

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. If input is the empty string, then return an error.

3. If input is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "transparent", then return an error.

4. If input is an ASCII case-insensitive match for one of the keywords listed in the SVG color keywords or CSS2 System Colors sections of the CSS3 Color specification, then return the simple color corresponding to that keyword. [CSS3COLOR]

5. If input is four characters long, and the first character in input is a U+0023 NUMBER SIGN (#) character, and the the last three characters of input are all in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+0046 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F, and U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A .. U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F, then run these substeps:

   1. Let result be a simple color.

   2. Interpret the second character of input as a hexadecimal digit; let the red component of result be the resulting number multiplied by 17.

   3. Interpret the third character of input as a hexadecimal digit; let the green component of result be the resulting number multiplied by 17.

   4. Interpret the fourth character of input as a hexadecimal digit; let the blue component of result be the resulting number multiplied by 17.

   5. Return result.

6. Replace any characters in input that have a Unicode codepoint greater than U+FFFF (i.e. any characters that are not in the basic multilingual plane) with the two-character string "00".

7. If input is longer than 128 characters, truncate input, leaving only the first 128 characters.

8. If the first character in input is a U+0023 NUMBER SIGN character (#), remove it.

9. Replace any character in input that is not in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) .. U+0039 DIGIT NINE (9), U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+0046 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F, and U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A .. U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F with the character U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0).

10. While input's length is zero or not a multiple of three, append a U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) character to input.

11. Split input into three strings of equal length, to obtain three components. Let length be the length of those components (one third the length of input).

12. If length is greater than 8, then remove the leading length-8 characters in each component, and let length be 8.

13. While length is greater than two and the first character in each component is a U+0030 DIGIT ZERO (0) character, remove that character and reduce length by one.

14. If length is still greater than two, truncate each component, leaving only the first two characters in each.

15. Let result be a simple color.

16. Interpret the first component as a hexadecimal number; let the red component of result be the resulting number.

17. Interpret the second component as a hexadecimal number; let the green component of result be the resulting number.

18. Interpret the third component as a hexadecimal number; let the blue component of result be the resulting number.

19. Return result.

The 2D graphics context has a separate color syntax that also handles opacity.

Space-separated tokens

A set of space-separated tokens is a set of zero or more words separated by one or more space characters, where words consist of any string of one or more characters, none of which are space characters.

A string containing a set of space-separated tokens may have leading or trailing space characters.

An unordered set of unique space-separated tokens is a set of space-separated tokens where none of the words are duplicated.

An ordered set of unique space-separated tokens is a set of space-separated tokens where none of the words are duplicated but where the order of the tokens is meaningful.

Sets of space-separated tokens sometimes have a defined set of allowed values. When a set of allowed values is defined, the tokens must all be from that list of allowed values; other values are non-conforming. If no such set of allowed values is provided, then all values are conforming.

When a user agent has to split a string on spaces, it must use the following algorithm:

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

3. Let tokens be a list of tokens, initially empty.

4. Skip whitespace

5. While position is not past the end of input:

   1. Collect a sequence of characters that are not space characters.

   2. Add the string collected in the previous step to tokens.

   3. Skip whitespace

6. Return tokens.

When a user agent has to remove a token from a string, it must use the following algorithm:

1. Let input be the string being modified.

2. Let token be the token being removed. It will not contain any space characters.

3. Let output be the output string, initially empty.

4. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

5. If position is beyond the end of input, set the string being modified to output, and abort these steps.

6. If the character at position is a space character:

   1. Append the character at position to the end of output.

   2. Increment position so it points at the next character in input.

   3. Return to step 5 in the overall set of steps.

7. Otherwise, the character at position is the first character of a token. Collect a sequence of characters that are not space characters, and let that be s.

8. If s is exactly equal to token, then:

   1. Skip whitespace (in input).

   2. Remove any space characters currently at the end of output.

   3. If position is not past the end of input, and output is not the empty string, append a single U+0020 SPACE character at the end of output.

9. Otherwise, append s to the end of output.

10. Return to step 6 in the overall set of steps.

This causes any occurrences of the token to be removed from the string, and any spaces that were surrounding the token to be collapsed to a single space, except at the start and end of the string, where such spaces are removed.

Comma-separated tokens

A set of comma-separated tokens is a set of zero or more tokens each separated from the next by a single U+002C COMMA character (,), where tokens consist of any string of zero or more characters, neither beginning nor ending with space characters, nor containing any U+002C COMMA characters (,), and optionally surrounded by space characters.

For instance, the string " a ,b,,d d " consists of four tokens: "a", "b", the empty string, and "d d". Leading and trailing whitespace around each token doesn't count as part of the token, and the empty string can be a token.

Sets of comma-separated tokens sometimes have further restrictions on what consists a valid token. When such restrictions are defined, the tokens must all fit within those restrictions; other values are non-conforming. If no such restrictions are specified, then all values are conforming.

When a user agent has to split a string on commas, it must use the following algorithm:

1. Let input be the string being parsed.

2. Let position be a pointer into input, initially pointing at the start of the string.

3. Let tokens be a list of tokens, initially empty.

4. Token: If position is past the end of input, jump to the last step.

5. Collect a sequence of characters that are not U+002C COMMA characters (,). Let s be the resulting sequence (which might be the empty string).

6. Remove any leading or trailing sequence of space characters from s.

7. Add s to tokens.

8. If position is not past the end of input, then the character at position is a U+002C COMMA character (,); advance position past that character.

9. Jump back to the step labeled token.

10. Return tokens.

Keywords and enumerated attributes

Some attributes are defined as taking one of a finite set of keywords. Such attributes are called enumerated attributes. The keywords are each defined to map to a particular state (several keywords might map to the same state, in which case some of the keywords are synonyms of each other; additionally, some of the keywords can be said to be non-conforming, and are only in the specification for historical reasons). In addition, two default states can be given. The first is the invalid value default, the second is the missing value default.

If an enumerated attribute is specified, the attribute's value must be an ASCII case-insensitive match for one of the given keywords that are not said to be non-conforming, with no leading or trailing whitespace.

When the attribute is specified, if its value is an ASCII case-insensitively match for one of the given keywords then that keyword's state is the state that the attribute represents. If the attribute value matches none of the given keywords, but the attribute has an invalid value default, then the attribute represents that state. Otherwise, if the attribute value matches none of the keywords but there is a missing value default state defined, then that is the state represented by the attribute. Otherwise, there is no default, and invalid values must be ignored.

When the attribute is not specified, if there is a missing value default state defined, then that is the state represented by the (missing) attribute. Otherwise, the absence of the attribute means that there is no state represented.

The empty string can be one of the keywords in some cases. For example the contenteditable attribute has two states: true, matching the true keyword and the empty string, false, matching false and all other keywords (it's the invalid value default). It could further be thought of as having a third state inherit, which would be the default when the attribute is not specified at all (the missing value default), but for various reasons that isn't the way this specification actually defines it.

References

A valid hash-name reference to an element of type type is a string consisting of a U+0023 NUMBER SIGN (#) character followed by a string which exactly matches the value of the name attribute of an element in the document with type type.

The rules for parsing a hash-name reference to an element of type type are as follows:

1. If the string being parsed does not contain a U+0023 NUMBER SIGN character, or if the first such character in the string is the last character in the string, then return null and abort these steps.

2. Let s be the string from the character immediately after the first U+0023 NUMBER SIGN character in the string being parsed up to the end of that string.

3. Return the first element of type type that has an id attribute whose value is a case-sensitive match for s or a name attribute whose value is a compatibility caseless match for s.

URLs

This specification defines the term URL, and defines various algorithms for dealing with URLs, because for historical reasons the rules defined by the URI and IRI specifications are not a complete description of what HTML user agents need to implement to be compatible with Web content.

Terminology

A URL is a string used to identify a resource.

A URL is a valid URL if at least one of the following conditions holds:

• The URL is a valid URI reference [RFC3986].

• The URL is a valid IRI reference and it has no query component. [RFC3987]

• The URL is a valid IRI reference and its query component contains no unescaped non-ASCII characters. [RFC3987]

• The URL is a valid IRI reference and the character encoding of the URL's Document is UTF-8 or UTF-16. [RFC3987]

A URL has an associated URL character encoding, determined as follows:

If the URL came from a script (e.g. as an argument to a method)

The URL character encoding is the script's character encoding.

If the URL came from a DOM node (e.g. from an element)

The node has a Document, and the URL character encoding is the document's character encoding.

If the URL had a character encoding defined when the URL was created or defined

The URL character encoding is as defined.

The term "URL" in this specification is used in a manner distinct from the precise technical meaning it is given in RFC 3986. Readers familiar with that RFC will find it easier to read this specification if they pretend the term "URL" as used herein is really called something else altogether.

Parsing URLs

To parse a URL url into its component parts, the user agent must use the following steps:

1. Strip leading and trailing space characters from url.

2. Parse url in the manner defined by RFC 3986, with the following exceptions:

   • Add all characters with codepoints less than or equal to U+0020 or greater than or equal to U+007F to the <unreserved> production.
   • Add the characters U+0022, U+003C, U+003E, U+005B .. U+005E, U+0060, and U+007B .. U+007D to the <unreserved> production.
   • Add a single U+0025 PERCENT SIGN character as a second alternative way of matching the <pct-encoded> production, except when the <pct-encoded> is used in the <reg-name> production.
   • Add the U+0023 NUMBER SIGN character to the characters allowed in the <fragment> production.

3. If url doesn't match the <URI-reference> production, even after the above changes are made to the ABNF definitions, then parsing the URL fails with an error. [RFC3986]

   Otherwise, parsing url was successful; the components of the URL are substrings of url defined as follows:

   <scheme>

   The substring matched by the <scheme> production, if any.

   <host>

   The substring matched by the <host> production, if any.

   <port>

   The substring matched by the <port> production, if any.

   <hostport>

   If there is a <scheme> component and a <port> component and the port given by the <port> component is different than the default port defined for the protocol given by the <scheme> component, then <hostport> is the substring that starts with the substring matched by the <host> production and ends with the substring matched by the <port> production, and includes the colon in between the two. Otherwise, it is the same as the <host> component.

   <path>

   The substring matched by one of the following productions, if one of them was matched:

   • <path-abempty>
   • <path-absolute>
   • <path-noscheme>
   • <path-rootless>
   • <path-empty>

   <query>

   The substring matched by the <query> production, if any.

   <fragment>

   The substring matched by the <fragment> production, if any.

   <host-specific>

   The substring that follows the substring matched by the <authority> production, or the whole string if the <authority> production wasn't matched.

Resolving URLs

To resolve a URL to an absolute URL relative to either another absolute URL or an element, the user agent must use the following steps. Resolving a URL can result in an error, in which case the URL is not resolvable.

1. Let url be the URL being resolved.

2. Let encoding be the URL character encoding.

3. If encoding is UTF-16, then change it to UTF-8.

4. If the algorithm was invoked with an absolute URL to use as the base URL, let base be that absolute URL.

   Otherwise, let base be the base URI of the element, as defined by the XML Base specification, with the base URI of the document entity being defined as the document base URL of the Document that owns the element. [XMLBASE]

   For the purposes of the XML Base specification, user agents must act as if all Document objects represented XML documents.

   It is possible for xml:base attributes to be present even in HTML fragments, as such attributes can be added dynamically using script. (Such scripts would not be conforming, however, as xml:base attributes are not allowed in HTML documents.)

   The document base URL of a Document is the absolute URL obtained by running these substeps:

   1. Let fallback base url be the document's address.

   2. If fallback base url is about:blank, and the Document's browsing context has a creator browsing context, then let fallback base url be the document base URL of the creator Document instead.

   3. If there is no base element that is both a child of the head element and has an href attribute, then the document base URL is fallback base url.

   4. Otherwise, let url be the value of the href attribute of the first such element.

   5. Resolve url relative to fallback base url (thus, the base href attribute isn't affected by xml:base attributes).

   6. The document base URL is the result of the previous step if it was successful; otherwise it is fallback base url.

5. Parse url into its component parts.

6. If parsing url resulted in a <host> component, then replace the matching subtring of url with the string that results from expanding any sequences of percent-encoded octets in that component that are valid UTF-8 sequences into Unicode characters as defined by UTF-8.

   If any percent-encoded octets in that component are not valid UTF-8 sequences, then return an error and abort these steps.

   Apply the IDNA ToASCII algorithm to the matching substring, with both the AllowUnassigned and UseSTD3ASCIIRules flags set. Replace the matching substring with the result of the ToASCII algorithm.

   If ToASCII fails to convert one of the components of the string, e.g. because it is too long or because it contains invalid characters, then return an error and abort these steps. [RFC3490]

7. If parsing url resulted in a <path> component, then replace the matching substring of url with the string that results from applying the following steps to each character other than U+0025 PERCENT SIGN (%) that doesn't match the original <path> production defined in RFC 3986:

   1. Encode the character into a sequence of octets as defined by UTF-8.
   2. Replace the character with the percent-encoded form of those octets. [RFC3986]

   For instance if url was "//example.com/a^b☺c%FFd%z/?e", then the <path> component's substring would be "/a^b☺c%FFd%z/" and the two characters that would have to be escaped would be "^" and "☺". The result after this step was applied would therefore be that url now had the value "//example.com/a%5Eb%E2%98%BAc%FFd%z/?e".

8. If parsing url resulted in a <query> component, then replace the matching substring of url with the string that results from applying the following steps to each character other than U+0025 PERCENT SIGN (%) that doesn't match the original <query> production defined in RFC 3986:

   1. If the character in question cannot be expressed in the encoding encoding, then replace it with a single 0x3F octet (an ASCII question mark) and skip the remaining substeps for this character.
   2. Encode the character into a sequence of octets as defined by the encoding encoding.
   3. Replace the character with the percent-encoded form of those octets. [RFC3986]

9. Apply the algorithm described in RFC 3986 section 5.2 Relative Resolution, using url as the potentially relative URI reference (R), and base as the base URI (Base). [RFC3986]

10. Apply any relevant conformance criteria of RFC 3986 and RFC 3987, returning an error and aborting these steps if appropriate. [RFC3986] [RFC3987]

    For instance, if an absolute URI that would be returned by the above algorithm violates the restrictions specific to its scheme, e.g. a data: URI using the "//" server-based naming authority syntax, then user agents are to treat this as an error instead.

11. Let result be the target URI (T) returned by the Relative Resolution algorithm.

12. If result uses a scheme with a server-based naming authority, replace all U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (\) characters in result with U+002F SOLIDUS (/) characters.

13. Return result.

A URL is an absolute URL if resolving it results in the same URL without an error.

Dynamic changes to base URLs

When an xml:base attribute changes, the attribute's element, and all descendant elements, are affected by a base URL change.

When a document's document base URL changes, all elements in that document are affected by a base URL change.

When an element is moved from one document to another, if the two documents have different base URLs, then that element and all its descendants are affected by a base URL change.

When an element is affected by a base URL change, it must act as described in the following list:

If the element is a hyperlink element

If the absolute URL identified by the hyperlink is being shown to the user, or if any data derived from that URL is affecting the display, then the href attribute should be reresolved relative to the element and the UI updated appropriately.

For example, the CSS :link/:visited pseudo-classes might have been affected.

If the hyperlink has a ping attribute and its absolute URL(s) are being shown to the user, then the ping attribute's tokens should be reresolved relative to the element and the UI updated appropriately.

If the element is a blockquote, q, ins, or del element with a cite attribute

If the absolute URL identified by the cite attribute is being shown to the user, or if any data derived from that URL is affecting the display, then the URL should be reresolved relative to the element and the UI updated appropriately.

Otherwise

The element is not directly affected.

Changing the base URL doesn't affect the image displayed by img elements, although subsequent accesses of the src DOM attribute from script will return a new absolute URL that might no longer correspond to the image being shown.

Interfaces for URL manipulation

An interface that has a complement of URL decomposition attributes will have seven attributes with the following definitions:

           attribute DOMString protocol;
           attribute DOMString host;
           attribute DOMString hostname;
           attribute DOMString port;
           attribute DOMString pathname;
           attribute DOMString search;
           attribute DOMString hash;

The attributes defined to be URL decomposition attributes must act as described for the attributes with the same corresponding names in this section.

In addition, an interface with a complement of URL decomposition attributes will define an input, which is a URL that the attributes act on, and a common setter action, which is a set of steps invoked when any of the attributes' setters are invoked.

The seven URL decomposition attributes have similar requirements.

On getting, if the input fulfills the condition given in the "getter condition" column corresponding to the attribute in the table below, the user agent must return the part of the input URL given in the "component" column, with any prefixes specified in the "prefix" column appropriately added to the start of the string and any suffixes specified in the "suffix" column appropriately added to the end of the string. Otherwise, the attribute must return the empty string.

On setting, the new value must first be mutated as described by the "setter preprocessor" column, then mutated by %-escaping any characters in the new value that are not valid in the relevant component as given by the "component" column. Then, if the resulting new value fulfills the condition given in the "setter condition" column, the user agent must make a new string output by replacing the component of the URL given by the "component" column in the input URL with the new value; otherwise, the user agent must let output be equal to the input. Finally, the user agent must invoke the common setter action with the value of output.

When replacing a component in the URL, if the component is part of an optional group in the URL syntax consisting of a character followed by the component, the component (including its prefix character) must be included even if the new value is the empty string.

The previous paragraph applies in particular to the ":" before a <port> component, the "?" before a <query> component, and the "#" before a <fragment> component.

For the purposes of the above definitions, URLs must be parsed using the URL parsing rules defined in this specification.

Fetching resources

When a user agent is to fetch a resource, the following steps must be run:

1. If the resource is identified by the URL about:blank, then return the empty string and abort these steps.

2. Perform the remaining steps asynchronously.

3. If the resource is identified by an absolute URL, and the resource is to be obtained using a idempotent action (such as an HTTP GET or equivalent), and it is already being downloaded for other reasons (e.g. another invocation of this algorithm), and the user agent is configured such that it is to reuse the data from the existing download instead of initiating a new one, then use the results of the existing download instead of starting a new one.

   Otherwise, at a time convenient to the user and the user agent, download (or otherwise obtain) the resource, applying the semantics of the relevant specifications (e.g. performing an HTTP GET or POST operation, or reading the file from disk, following redirects, dereferencing javascript: URLs, etc).

4. When the resource is available, queue a task that uses the resource as appropriate. If the resource can be processed incrementally, as, for instance, with a progressively interlaced JPEG or an HTML file, multiple tasks may be queued to process the data as it is downloaded. The task source for these tasks is the networking task source.

The application cache processing model introduces some changes to the networking model to handle the returning of cached resources.

The navigation processing model handles redirects itself, overriding the redirection handling that would be done by the fetching algorithm.

Whether the type sniffing rules apply to the fetched resource depends on the algorithm that invokes the rules — they are not always applicable.

Protocol concepts

User agents can implement a variety of transfer protocols, but this specification mostly defines behavior in terms of HTTP. [HTTP]

The HTTP GET method is equivalent to the default retrieval action of the protocol. For example, RETR in FTP. Such actions are idempotent and safe, in HTTP terms.

The HTTP response codes are equivalent to statuses in other protocols that have the same basic meanings. For example, a "file not found" error is equivalent to a 404 code, a server error is equivalent to a 5xx code, and so on.

The HTTP headers are equivalent to fields in other protocols that have the same basic meaning. For example, the the HTTP authentication headers are equivalent to the authentication aspects of the FTP protocol.

If there are any specific questions with what should be considered equivalent to what, let me know, and I'll make it more explicit for those cases.

Encrypted HTTP and related security concerns

Anything in this specification that refers to HTTP also applies to HTTP-over-TLS, as represented by URLs representing the https scheme.

User agents should report certificate errors to the user and must either refuse to download resources sent with erroneous certificates or must act as if such resources were in fact served with no encryption.

Not doing so can result in users not noticing man-in-the-middle attacks.

Determining the type of a resource

It is imperative that the rules in this section be followed exactly. When a user agent uses different heuristics for content type detection than the server expects, security problems can occur. For example, if a server believes that the client will treat a contributed file as an image (and thus treat it as benign), but a Web browser believes the content to be HTML (and thus execute any scripts contained therein), the end user can be exposed to malicious content, making the user vulnerable to cookie theft attacks and other cross-site scripting attacks.

Content-Type metadata

What explicit Content-Type metadata is associated with the resource (the resource's type information) depends on the protocol that was used to fetch the resource.

For HTTP resources, only the first Content-Type HTTP header, if any, contributes any type information; the explicit type of the resource is then the value of that header, interpreted as described by the HTTP specifications. If the Content-Type HTTP header is present but the value of the first such header cannot be interpreted as described by the HTTP specifications (e.g. because its value doesn't contain a U+002F SOLIDUS ('/') character), then the resource has no type information (even if there are multiple Content-Type HTTP headers and one of the other ones is syntactically correct). [HTTP]

For resources fetched from the file system, user agents should use platform-specific conventions, e.g. operating system extension/type mappings.

Extensions must not be used for determining resource types for resources fetched over HTTP.

For resources fetched over most other protocols, e.g. FTP, there is no type information.

The algorithm for extracting an encoding from a Content-Type, given a string s, is as follows. It either returns an encoding or nothing.

1. Find the first seven characters in s that are an ASCII case-insensitive match for the word "charset". If no such match is found, return nothing.

2. Skip any U+0009, U+000A, U+000C, U+000D, or U+0020 characters that immediately follow the word 'charset' (there might not be any).

3. If the next character is not a U+003D EQUALS SIGN ('='), return nothing.

4. Skip any U+0009, U+000A, U+000C, U+000D, or U+0020 characters that immediately follow the equals sign (there might not be any).

5. Process the next character as follows:

   If it is a U+0022 QUOTATION MARK ('"') and there is a later U+0022 QUOTATION MARK ('"') in s

   If it is a U+0027 APOSTROPHE ("'") and there is a later U+0027 APOSTROPHE ("'") in s

   Return the string between this character and the next earliest occurrence of this character.

   If it is an unmatched U+0022 QUOTATION MARK ('"')

   If it is an unmatched U+0027 APOSTROPHE ("'")

   If there is no next character

   Return nothing.

   Otherwise

   Return the string from this character to the first U+0009, U+000A, U+000C, U+000D, U+0020, or U+003B character or the end of s, whichever comes first.

The above algorithm is a willful violation of the HTTP specification. [RFC2616]

Content-Type sniffing: Web pages

The sniffed type of a resource must be found as follows:

1. If the user agent is configured to strictly obey Content-Type headers for this resource, then jump to the last step in this set of steps.

2. If the resource was fetched over an HTTP protocol and there is an HTTP Content-Type header and the value of the first such header has bytes that exactly match one of the following lines:

   Bytes in Hexadecimal	Textual representation
   74 65 78 74 2f 70 6c 61 69 6e	text/plain
   74 65 78 74 2f 70 6c 61 69 6e 3b 20 63 68 61 72 73 65 74 3d 49 53 4f 2d 38 38 35 39 2d 31	text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
   74 65 78 74 2f 70 6c 61 69 6e 3b 20 63 68 61 72 73 65 74 3d 69 73 6f 2d 38 38 35 39 2d 31	text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
   74 65 78 74 2f 70 6c 61 69 6e 3b 20 63 68 61 72 73 65 74 3d 55 54 46 2d 38	text/plain; charset=UTF-8

   ...then jump to the text or binary section below.

3. Let official type be the type given by the Content-Type metadata for the resource, ignoring parameters. If there is no such type, jump to the unknown type step below. Comparisons with this type, as defined by MIME specifications, are done in an ASCII case-insensitive manner. [RFC2046]

4. If official type is "unknown/unknown" or "application/unknown", jump to the unknown type step below.

5. If official type ends in "+xml", or if it is either "text/xml" or "application/xml", then the sniffed type of the resource is official type; return that and abort these steps.

6. If official type is an image type supported by the user agent (e.g. "image/png", "image/gif", "image/jpeg", etc), then jump to the images section below, passing it the official type.

7. If official type is "text/html", then jump to the feed or HTML section below.

8. The sniffed type of the resource is official type.

Content-Type sniffing: text or binary

1. The user agent may wait for 512 or more bytes of the resource to be available.

2. Let n be the smaller of either 512 or the number of bytes already available.

3. If n is 4 or more, and the first bytes of the resource match one of the following byte sets:

   Bytes in Hexadecimal	Description
   FE FF	UTF-16BE BOM
   FF FE	UTF-16LE BOM
   EF BB BF	UTF-8 BOM

   ...then the sniffed type of the resource is "text/plain". Abort these steps.

4. If none of the first n bytes of the resource are binary data bytes then the sniffed type of the resource is "text/plain". Abort these steps.

5. If the first bytes of the resource match one of the byte sequences in the "pattern" column of the table in the unknown type section below, ignoring any rows whose cell in the "security" column says "scriptable" (or "n/a"), then the sniffed type of the resource is the type given in the corresponding cell in the "sniffed type" column on that row; abort these steps.

   It is critical that this step not ever return a scriptable type (e.g. text/html), as otherwise that would allow a privilege escalation attack.

6. Otherwise, the sniffed type of the resource is "application/octet-stream".

Bytes covered by the following ranges are binary data bytes:

• 0x00 - 0x08
• 0x0B
• 0x0E - 0x1A
• 0x1C - 0x1F

Content-Type sniffing: unknown type

1. The user agent may wait for 512 or more bytes of the resource to be available.

2. Let stream length be the smaller of either 512 or the number of bytes already available.

3. For each row in the table below:

   If the row has no "WS" bytes:

   1. Let pattern length be the length of the pattern (number of bytes described by the cell in the second column of the row).
   2. If stream length is smaller than pattern length then skip this row.
   3. Apply the "and" operator to the first pattern length bytes of the resource and the given mask (the bytes in the cell of first column of that row), and let the result be the data.
   4. If the bytes of the data matches the given pattern bytes exactly, then the sniffed type of the resource is the type given in the cell of the third column in that row; abort these steps.

   If the row has a "WS" byte:

   1. Let index_pattern be an index into the mask and pattern byte strings of the row.

   2. Let index_stream be an index into the byte stream being examined.

   3. Loop: If index_stream points beyond the end of the byte stream, then this row doesn't match, skip this row.

   4. Examine the index_streamth byte of the byte stream as follows:

      If the index_patternth byte of the pattern is a normal hexadecimal byte and not a "WS" byte:

      If the "and" operator, applied to the index_streamth byte of the stream and the index_patternth byte of the mask, yield a value different that the index_patternth byte of the pattern, then skip this row.

      Otherwise, increment index_pattern to the next byte in the mask and pattern and index_stream to the next byte in the byte stream.

      Otherwise, if the index_patternth byte of the pattern is a "WS" byte:

      "WS" means "whitespace", and allows insignificant whitespace to be skipped when sniffing for a type signature.

      If the index_streamth byte of the stream is one of 0x09 (ASCII TAB), 0x0A (ASCII LF), 0x0C (ASCII FF), 0x0D (ASCII CR), or 0x20 (ASCII space), then increment only the index_stream to the next byte in the byte stream.

      Otherwise, increment only the index_pattern to the next byte in the mask and pattern.

   5. If index_pattern does not point beyond the end of the mask and pattern byte strings, then jump back to the loop step in this algorithm.

   6. Otherwise, the sniffed type of the resource is the type given in the cell of the third column in that row; abort these steps.

4. If none of the first n bytes of the resource are binary data bytes then the sniffed type of the resource is "text/plain". Abort these steps.

5. Otherwise, the sniffed type of the resource is "application/octet-stream".

The table used by the above algorithm is:

I'd like to add types like MPEG, AVI, Flash, Java, etc, to the above table.

User agents may support further types if desired, by implicitly adding to the above table. However, user agents should not use any other patterns for types already mentioned in the table above, as this could then be used for privilege escalation (where, e.g., a server uses the above table to determine that content is not HTML and thus safe from XSS attacks, but then a user agent detects it as HTML anyway and allows script to execute).

The column marked "security" is used by the algorithm in the "text or binary" section, to avoid sniffing text/plain content as a type that can be used for a privilege escalation attack.

Content-Type sniffing: image

If the resource's official type is "image/svg+xml", then the sniffed type of the resource is its official type (an XML type).

Otherwise, if the first bytes of the resource match one of the byte sequences in the first column of the following table, then the sniffed type of the resource is the type given in the corresponding cell in the second column on the same row:

Otherwise, the sniffed type of the resource is the same as its official type.

Content-Type sniffing: feed or HTML

1. The user agent may wait for 512 or more bytes of the resource to be available.

2. Let s be the stream of bytes, and let s[i] represent the byte in s with position i, treating s as zero-indexed (so the first byte is at i=0).

3. If at any point this algorithm requires the user agent to determine the value of a byte in s which is not yet available, or which is past the first 512 bytes of the resource, or which is beyond the end of the resource, the user agent must stop this algorithm, and assume that the sniffed type of the resource is "text/html".

   User agents are allowed, by the first step of this algorithm, to wait until the first 512 bytes of the resource are available.

4. Initialize pos to 0.

5. If s[0] is 0xEF, s[1] is 0xBB, and s[2] is 0xBF, then set pos to 3. (This skips over a leading UTF-8 BOM, if any.)

6. Loop start: Examine s[pos].

   If it is 0x09 (ASCII tab), 0x20 (ASCII space), 0x0A (ASCII LF), or 0x0D (ASCII CR)

   Increase pos by 1 and repeat this step.

   If it is 0x3C (ASCII "<")

   Increase pos by 1 and go to the next step.

   If it is anything else

   The sniffed type of the resource is "text/html". Abort these steps.

7. If the bytes with positions pos to pos+2 in s are exactly equal to 0x21, 0x2D, 0x2D respectively (ASCII for "!--"), then:

   1. Increase pos by 3.
   2. If the bytes with positions pos to pos+2 in s are exactly equal to 0x2D, 0x2D, 0x3E respectively (ASCII for "-->"), then increase pos by 3 and jump back to the previous step (the step labeled loop start) in the overall algorithm in this section.
   3. Otherwise, increase pos by 1.
   4. Return to step 2 in these substeps.

8. If s[pos] is 0x21 (ASCII "!"):

   1. Increase pos by 1.
   2. If s[pos] equal 0x3E, then increase pos by 1 and jump back to the step labeled loop start in the overall algorithm in this section.
   3. Otherwise, return to step 1 in these substeps.

9. If s[pos] is 0x3F (ASCII "?"):

   1. Increase pos by 1.
   2. If s[pos] and s[pos+1] equal 0x3F and 0x3E respectively, then increase pos by 1 and jump back to the step labeled loop start in the overall algorithm in this section.
   3. Otherwise, return to step 1 in these substeps.

10. Otherwise, if the bytes in s starting at pos match any of the sequences of bytes in the first column of the following table, then the user agent must follow the steps given in the corresponding cell in the second column of the same row.

    Bytes in Hexadecimal	Requirement	Comment
    72 73 73	The sniffed type of the resource is "application/rss+xml"; abort these steps	The three ASCII characters "rss"
    66 65 65 64	The sniffed type of the resource is "application/atom+xml"; abort these steps	The four ASCII characters "feed"
    72 64 66 3A 52 44 46	Continue to the next step in this algorithm	The ASCII characters "rdf:RDF"

    If none of the byte sequences above match the bytes in s starting at pos, then the sniffed type of the resource is "text/html". Abort these steps.

11. If, before the next ">", you find two xmlns* attributes with http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# and http://purl.org/rss/1.0/ as the namespaces, then the sniffed type of the resource is "application/rss+xml", abort these steps. (maybe we only need to check for http://purl.org/rss/1.0/ actually)

12. Otherwise, the sniffed type of the resource is "text/html".

For efficiency reasons, implementations may wish to implement this algorithm and the algorithm for detecting the character encoding of HTML documents in parallel.

Common DOM interfaces

Reflecting content attributes in DOM attributes

Some DOM attributes are defined to reflect a particular content attribute. This means that on getting, the DOM attribute returns the current value of the content attribute, and on setting, the DOM attribute changes the value of the content attribute to the given value.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is a DOMString attribute whose content attribute is defined to contain a URL, then on getting, the DOM attribute must resolve the value of the content attribute relative to the element and return the resulting absolute URL if that was successful, or the empty string otherwise; and on setting, must set the content attribute to the specified literal value. If the content attribute is absent, the DOM attribute must return the default value, if the content attribute has one, or else the empty string.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is a DOMString attribute whose content attribute is defined to contain one or more URLs, then on getting, the DOM attribute must split the content attribute on spaces and return the concatenation of resolving each token URL to an absolute URL relative to the element, with a single U+0020 SPACE character between each URL, ignoring any tokens that did not resolve successfully. If the content attribute is absent, the DOM attribute must return the default value, if the content attribute has one, or else the empty string. On setting, the DOM attribute must set the content attribute to the specified literal value.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is a DOMString whose content attribute is an enumerated attribute, and the DOM attribute is limited to only known values, then, on getting, the DOM attribute must return the conforming value associated with the state the attribute is in (in its canonical case), or the empty string if the attribute is in a state that has no associated keyword value; and on setting, if the new value is an ASCII case-insensitive match for one of the keywords given for that attribute, then the content attribute must be set to the conforming value associated with the state that the attribute would be in if set to the given new value, otherwise, if the new value is the empty string, then the content attribute must be removed, otherwise, the setter must raise a SYNTAX_ERR exception.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is a DOMString but doesn't fall into any of the above categories, then the getting and setting must be done in a transparent, case-preserving manner.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is a boolean attribute, then on getting the DOM attribute must return true if the attribute is set, and false if it is absent. On setting, the content attribute must be removed if the DOM attribute is set to false, and must be set to have the same value as its name if the DOM attribute is set to true. (This corresponds to the rules for boolean content attributes.)

If a reflecting DOM attribute is a signed integer type (long) then, on getting, the content attribute must be parsed according to the rules for parsing signed integers, and if that is successful, and the value is in the range of the DOM attribute's type, the resulting value must be returned. If, on the other hand, it fails or returns an out of range value, or if the attribute is absent, then the default value must be returned instead, or 0 if there is no default value. On setting, the given value must be converted to the shortest possible string representing the number as a valid integer in base ten and then that string must be used as the new content attribute value.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is an unsigned integer type (unsigned long) then, on getting, the content attribute must be parsed according to the rules for parsing non-negative integers, and if that is successful, and the value is in the range of the DOM attribute's type, the resulting value must be returned. If, on the other hand, it fails or returns an out of range value, or if the attribute is absent, the default value must be returned instead, or 0 if there is no default value. On setting, the given value must be converted to the shortest possible string representing the number as a valid non-negative integer in base ten and then that string must be used as the new content attribute value.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is an unsigned integer type (unsigned long) that is limited to only positive non-zero numbers, then the behavior is similar to the previous case, but zero is not allowed. On getting, the content attribute must first be parsed according to the rules for parsing non-negative integers, and if that is successful, and the value is in the range of the DOM attribute's type, the resulting value must be returned. If, on the other hand, it fails or returns an out of range value, or if the attribute is absent, the default value must be returned instead, or 1 if there is no default value. On setting, if the value is zero, the user agent must fire an INDEX_SIZE_ERR exception. Otherwise, the given value must be converted to the shortest possible string representing the number as a valid non-negative integer in base ten and then that string must be used as the new content attribute value.

If a reflecting DOM attribute is a floating point number type (float) and it doesn't fall into one of the earlier categories, then, on getting, the content attribute must be parsed according to the rules for parsing floating point number values, and if that is successful, and the value is in the range of the DOM attribute's type, the resulting value must be returned. If, on the other hand, it fails or returns an out of range value, or if the attribute is absent, the default value must be returned instead, or 0.0 if there is no default value. On setting, the given value must be converted to the best representation of the floating point number and then that string must be used as the new content attribute value.

The values ±Infinity and NaN throw an exception on setting, as defined by WebIDL. [WEBIDL]

If a reflecting DOM attribute has the type HTMLElement, or an interface that descends from HTMLElement, then, on getting, it must run the following algorithm (stopping at the first point where a value is returned):

1. If the corresponding content attribute is absent, then the DOM attribute must return null.
2. Let candidate be the element that the document.getElementById() method would find if it was passed as its argument the current value of the corresponding content attribute.
3. If candidate is null, or if it is not type-compatible with the DOM attribute, then the DOM attribute must return null.
4. Otherwise, it must return candidate.

On setting, if the given element has an id attribute, then the content attribute must be set to the value of that id attribute. Otherwise, the DOM attribute must be set to the empty string.

Collections

The HTMLCollection, HTMLFormControlsCollection, and HTMLOptionsCollection interfaces represent various lists of DOM nodes. Collectively, objects implementing these interfaces are called collections.

When a collection is created, a filter and a root are associated with the collection.

For example, when the HTMLCollection object for the document.images attribute is created, it is associated with a filter that selects only img elements, and rooted at the root of the document.

The collection then represents a live view of the subtree rooted at the collection's root, containing only nodes that match the given filter. The view is linear. In the absence of specific requirements to the contrary, the nodes within the collection must be sorted in tree order.

The rows list is not in tree order.

An attribute that returns a collection must return the same object every time it is retrieved.

HTMLCollection

The HTMLCollection interface represents a generic collection of elements.

[Callable=namedItem]
interface HTMLCollection {
  readonly attribute unsigned long length;
  [IndexGetter] Element item(in unsigned long index);
  [NameGetter] Element namedItem(in DOMString name);
};

The object's indices of the supported indexed properties are the numbers in the range zero to one less than the number of nodes represented by the collection. If there are no such elements, then there are no supported indexed properties.

The length attribute must return the number of nodes represented by the collection.

The item(index) method must return the indexth node in the collection. If there is no indexth node in the collection, then the method must return null.

The names of the supported named properties consist of the values of the name attributes of each a, applet, area, embed, form, frame, frameset, iframe, img, and object element represented by the collection with a name attribute, plus the list of IDs that the elements represented by the collection have.

The namedItem(key) method must return the first node in the collection that matches the following requirements:

• It is an a, applet, area, embed, form, frame, frameset, iframe, img, or object element with a name attribute equal to key, or,
• It is an element with an ID key.

If no such elements are found, then the method must return null.

HTMLFormControlsCollection

The HTMLFormControlsCollection interface represents a collection of listed elements in form and fieldset elements.

[Callable=namedItem]
interface HTMLFormControlsCollection {
  readonly attribute unsigned long length;
  [IndexGetter] HTMLElement item(in unsigned long index);
  [NameGetter] Object namedItem(in DOMString name);
};

The object's indices of the supported indexed properties are the numbers in the range zero to one less than the number of nodes represented by the collection. If there are no such elements, then there are no supported indexed properties.

The length attribute must return the number of nodes represented by the collection.

The item(index) method must return the indexth node in the collection. If there is no indexth node in the collection, then the method must return null.

The names of the supported named properties consist of the values of all the id and name attributes of all the elements represented by the collection.

The namedItem(name) method must act according to the following algorithm:

1. If, at the time the method is called, there is exactly one node in the collection that has either an id attribute or a name attribute equal to name, then return that node and stop the algorithm.
2. Otherwise, if there are no nodes in the collection that have either an id attribute or a name attribute equal to name, then return null and stop the algorithm.
3. Otherwise, create a NodeList object representing a live view of the HTMLFormControlsCollection object, further filtered so that the only nodes in the NodeList object are those that have either an id attribute or a name attribute equal to name. The nodes in the NodeList object must be sorted in tree order.
4. Return that NodeList object.

HTMLOptionsCollection

The HTMLOptionsCollection interface represents a list of option elements. It is always rooted on a select element and has attributes and methods that manipulate that element's descendants.

[Callable=namedItem]
interface HTMLOptionsCollection {
           attribute unsigned long length;
  [IndexGetter] HTMLOptionElement item(in unsigned long index);
  [NameGetter] Object namedItem(in DOMString name);
  void add(in HTMLElement element, in HTMLElement before);
  void add(in HTMLElement element, in long before);
  void remove(in long index);
};

The object's indices of the supported indexed properties are the numbers in the range zero to one less than the number of nodes represented by the collection. If there are no such elements, then there are no supported indexed properties.

On getting, the length attribute must return the number of nodes represented by the collection.

On setting, the behavior depends on whether the new value is equal to, greater than, or less than the number of nodes represented by the collection at that time. If the number is the same, then setting the attribute must do nothing. If the new value is greater, then n new option elements with no attributes and no child nodes must be appended to the select element on which the HTMLOptionsCollection is rooted, where n is the difference between the two numbers (new value minus old value). If the new value is lower, then the last n nodes in the collection must be removed from their parent nodes, where n is the difference between the two numbers (old value minus new value).

Setting length never removes or adds any optgroup elements, and never adds new children to existing optgroup elements (though it can remove children from them).

The item(index) method must return the indexth node in the collection. If there is no indexth node in the collection, then the method must return null.

The names of the supported named properties consist of the values of all the id and name attributes of all the elements represented by the collection.

The namedItem(name) method must act according to the following algorithm:

1. If, at the time the method is called, there is exactly one node in the collection that has either an id attribute or a name attribute equal to name, then return that node and stop the algorithm.
2. Otherwise, if there are no nodes in the collection that have either an id attribute or a name attribute equal to name, then return null and stop the algorithm.
3. Otherwise, create a NodeList object representing a live view of the HTMLOptionsCollection object, further filtered so that the only nodes in the NodeList object are those that have either an id attribute or a name attribute equal to name. The nodes in the NodeList object must be sorted in tree order.
4. Return that NodeList object.

The add(element, before) method must act according to the following algorithm:

1. If element is not an option or optgroup element, then return and abort these steps.

2. If element is an ancestor of the select element element on which the HTMLOptionsCollection is rooted, then throw a HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR exception.

3. If before is an element, but that element isn't a descendant of the select element element on which the HTMLOptionsCollection is rooted, then throw a NOT_FOUND_ERR exception.

4. If element and before are the same element, then return and abort these steps.

5. If before is a node, then let reference be that node. Otherwise, if before is an integer, and there is a beforeth node in the collection, let reference be that node. Otherwise, let reference be null.

6. If reference is not null, let parent be the parent node of reference. Otherwise, let parent be the select element element on which the HTMLOptionsCollection is rooted.

7. Act as if the DOM Core insertBefore() method was invoked on the parent node, with element as the first argument and reference as the second argument.

The remove(index) method must act according to the following algorithm:

1. If the number of nodes represented by the collection is zero, abort these steps.

2. If index is not a number greater than or equal to 0 and less than the number of nodes represented by the collection, let element be the first element in the collection. Otherwise, let element be the indexth element in the collection.

3. Remove element from its parent node.

Safe passing of structured data

When a user agent is required to obtain a structured clone of an object, it must run the following algorithm, which either returns a separate object, or throws an exception.

1. Let input be the object being cloned.

2. Let memory be a list of objects, initially empty. (This is used to catch cycles.)

3. Let output be the object resulting from calling the internal structured cloning algorithm with input and memory.

4. Return output.

The internal structured cloning algorithm is always called with two arguments, input and memory, and its behavior depends on the type of input, as follows:

If input is the undefined value

Return the undefined value.

If input is the null value

Return the null value.

If input is the false value

Return the false value.

If input is the true value

Return the true value.

If input is a Number object

Return a newly constructed Number object with the same value as input.

If input is a String object

Return a newly constructed String object with the same value as input.

If input is a Date object

Return a newly constructed Date object with the same value as input.

If input is a host object

Return the null value.

If input is an Array object

If input is an Object object

1. If input is in memory, then throw a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR exception and abort the overall structured clone algorithm.

2. Otherwise, let new memory be a list consisting of the items in memory with the addition of input.

3. Create a new object, output, of the same type as input: either an Array or an Object.

4. For each property in input, add a corresponding property to output having the same name, and having a value created from invoking the internal structured cloning algorithm recursively with the value of the property as the "input" argument and new memory as the "memory" argument. The order of the properties in the input and output objects must be the same.

5. Return output.

Exceptions

The following DOMException codes are defined in DOM Core. [DOMCORE]

1. INDEX_SIZE_ERR
2. DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR
3. HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR
4. WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR
5. INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR
6. NO_DATA_ALLOWED_ERR
7. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR
8. NOT_FOUND_ERR
9. NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR
10. INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR
11. INVALID_STATE_ERR
12. SYNTAX_ERR
13. INVALID_MODIFICATION_ERR
14. NAMESPACE_ERR
15. INVALID_ACCESS_ERR
16. VALIDATION_ERR
17. TYPE_MISMATCH_ERR
18. SECURITY_ERR
19. NETWORK_ERR
20. ABORT_ERR
21. URL_MISMATCH_ERR
22. QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR
23. UNAVAILABLE_SCRIPT_ERR
81. PARSE_ERR
82. SERIALISE_ERR

Garbage collection

There is an implied strong reference from any DOM attribute that returns a pre-existing object to that object.

Semantics and structure of HTML documents

Introduction

This section is non-normative.

An introduction to marking up a document.

Documents

Every XML and HTML document in an HTML UA is represented by a Document object. [DOM3CORE]

The document's address is an absolute URL that is set when the Document is created.

When a Document is created by a script using the createDocument() API, the document's address is the same as the document's address of the active document of the script's browsing context.

Document objects are assumed to be XML documents unless they are flagged as being HTML documents when they are created. Whether a document is an HTML document or an XML document affects the behavior of certain APIs, as well as a few CSS rendering rules. [CSS21]

A Document object created by the createDocument() API on the DOMImplementation object is initially an XML document, but can be made into an HTML document by calling document.open() on it.

Documents in the DOM

All Document objects (in user agents implementing this specification) must also implement the HTMLDocument interface, available using binding-specific methods. (This is the case whether or not the document in question is an HTML document or indeed whether it contains any HTML elements at all.) Document objects must also implement the document-level interface of any other namespaces found in the document that the UA supports. For example, if an HTML implementation also supports SVG, then the Document object must implement HTMLDocument and SVGDocument.

Because the HTMLDocument interface is now obtained using binding-specific casting methods instead of simply being the primary interface of the document object, it is no longer defined as inheriting from Document.

[NameGetter=OverrideBuiltins, ImplementedOn=Document]
interface HTMLDocument {
  // resource metadata management
  [PutForwards=href] readonly attribute Location location;
  readonly attribute DOMString URL;
           attribute DOMString domain;
  readonly attribute DOMString referrer;
           attribute DOMString cookie;
  readonly attribute DOMString lastModified;
  readonly attribute DOMString compatMode;
           attribute DOMString charset;
  readonly attribute DOMString characterSet;
  readonly attribute DOMString defaultCharset;
  readonly attribute DOMString readyState;

  // DOM tree accessors
           attribute DOMString title;
           attribute DOMString dir;
           attribute HTMLElement body;
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection images;
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection embeds;
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection plugins;
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection links;
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection forms;
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection anchors;
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection scripts;
  NodeList getElementsByName(in DOMString elementName);
  NodeList getElementsByClassName(in DOMString classNames);

  // dynamic markup insertion
           attribute DOMString innerHTML;
  HTMLDocument open([Optional] in DOMString type, [Optional] in DOMString replace);
  WindowProxy open(in DOMString url, in DOMString name, in DOMString features, [Optional] in boolean replace);
  void close();
  void write([Variadic] in DOMString text);
  void writeln([Variadic] in DOMString text);

  // user interaction
  Selection getSelection();
  readonly attribute Element activeElement;
  boolean hasFocus();
           attribute DOMString designMode;
  boolean execCommand(in DOMString commandId);
  boolean execCommand(in DOMString commandId, in boolean showUI);
  boolean execCommand(in DOMString commandId, in boolean showUI, in DOMString value);
  boolean queryCommandEnabled(in DOMString commandId);
  boolean queryCommandIndeterm(in DOMString commandId);
  boolean queryCommandState(in DOMString commandId);
  boolean queryCommandSupported(in DOMString commandId);
  DOMString queryCommandValue(in DOMString commandId);
  readonly attribute HTMLCollection commands;
};

Since the HTMLDocument interface holds methods and attributes related to a number of disparate features, the members of this interface are described in various different sections.

Security

User agents must raise a SECURITY_ERR exception whenever any of the members of an HTMLDocument object are accessed by scripts whose effective script origin is not the same as the Document's effective script origin.

Resource metadata management

The URL attribute must return the document's address.

The referrer attribute must return either the address of the active document of the source browsing context at the time the navigation was started (that is, the page which navigated the browsing context to the current document), or the empty string if there is no such originating page, or if the UA has been configured not to report referrers in this case, or if the navigation was initiated for a hyperlink with a noreferrer keyword.

In the case of HTTP, the referrer DOM attribute will match the Referer (sic) header that was sent when fetching the current page.

Typically user agents are configured to not report referrers in the case where the referrer uses an encrypted protocol and the current page does not (e.g. when navigating from an https: page to an http: page).

The cookie attribute represents the cookies of the resource.

On setting, if the document is not associated with a browsing context then the user agent must raise an INVALID_STATE_ERR exception. Otherwise, if the document's address does not use a server-based naming authority, it must do nothing. Otherwise, the user agent must act as it would when processing cookies if it had just attempted to fetch the document's address over HTTP, and had received a response with a Set-Cookie header whose value was the specified value, as per RFC 2109 sections 4.3.1, 4.3.2, and 4.3.3 or later specifications, but without overwriting the values of HTTP-only cookies. [RFC2109] [RFC2965]

This specification does not define what makes an HTTP-only cookie, and at the time of publication the editor is not aware of any reference for HTTP-only cookies. They are a feature supported by some Web browsers wherein an "httponly" parameter added to the cookie string causes the cookie to be hidden from script.

Since the cookie attribute is accessible across frames, the path restrictions on cookies are only a tool to help manage which cookies are sent to which parts of the site, and are not in any way a security feature.

The lastModified attribute, on getting, must return the date and time of the Document's source file's last modification, in the user's local timezone, in the following format:

1. The month component of the date.
2. A U+002F SOLIDUS character ('/').
3. The day component of the date.
4. A U+002F SOLIDUS character ('/').
5. The year component of the date.
6. A U+0020 SPACE character.
7. The hours component of the time.
8. A U+003A COLON character (':').
9. The minutes component of the time.
10. A U+003A COLON character (':').
11. The seconds component of the time.

All the numeric components above, other than the year, must be given as two digits in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE representing the number in base ten, zero-padded if necessary.

The Document's source file's last modification date and time must be derived from relevant features of the networking protocols used, e.g. from the value of the HTTP Last-Modified header of the document, or from metadata in the file system for local files. If the last modification date and time are not known, the attribute must return the string 01/01/1970 00:00:00.

A Document is always set to one of three modes: no quirks mode, the default; quirks mode, used typically for legacy documents; and limited quirks mode, also known as "almost standards" mode. The mode is only ever changed from the default by the HTML parser, based on the presence, absence, or value of the DOCTYPE string.

The compatMode DOM attribute must return the literal string "CSS1Compat" unless the document has been set to quirks mode by the HTML parser, in which case it must instead return the literal string "BackCompat".

Documents have an associated character encoding. When a Document object is created, the document's character encoding must be initialized to UTF-16. Various algorithms during page loading affect this value, as does the charset setter. [IANACHARSET]

The charset DOM attribute must, on getting, return the preferred MIME name of the document's character encoding. On setting, if the new value is an IANA-registered alias for a character encoding, the document's character encoding must be set to that character encoding. (Otherwise, nothing happens.)

The characterSet DOM attribute must, on getting, return the preferred MIME name of the document's character encoding.

The defaultCharset DOM attribute must, on getting, return the preferred MIME name of a character encoding, possibly the user's default encoding, or an encoding associated with the user's current geographical location, or any arbitrary encoding name.

Each document has a current document readiness. When a Document object is created, it must have its current document readiness set to the string "loading" if the document is associated with an HTML parser or an XML parser, or to the string "complete" otherwise. Various algorithms during page loading affect this value. When the value is set, the user agent must fire a simple event called readystatechange at the Document object.

The readyState DOM attribute must, on getting, return the current document readiness.

DOM tree accessors

The html element of a document is the document's root element, if there is one and it's an html element, or null otherwise.

The head element of a document is the first head element that is a child of the html element, if there is one, or null otherwise.

The title element of a document is the first title element in the document (in tree order), if there is one, or null otherwise.

The title attribute must, on getting, run the following algorithm:

1. If the root element is an svg element in the "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" namespace, and the user agent supports SVG, then the getter must return the value that would have been returned by the DOM attribute of the same name on the SVGDocument interface.

2. Otherwise, it must return a concatenation of the data of all the child text nodes of the title element, in tree order, or the empty string if the title element is null.

On setting, the following algorithm must be run:

1. If the root element is an svg element in the "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" namespace, and the user agent supports SVG, then the setter must defer to the setter for the DOM attribute of the same name on the SVGDocument interface (if it is readonly, then this will raise an exception). Stop the algorithm here.

2. If the title element is null and the head element is null, then the attribute must do nothing. Stop the algorithm here.
3. If the title element is null, then a new title element must be created and appended to the head element.
4. The children of the title element (if any) must all be removed.
5. A single Text node whose data is the new value being assigned must be appended to the title element.

The title attribute on the HTMLDocument interface should shadow the attribute of the same name on the SVGDocument interface when the user agent supports both HTML and SVG.

The body element of a document is the first child of the html element that is either a body element or a frameset element. If there is no such element, it is null. If the body element is null, then when the specification requires that events be fired at "the body element", they must instead be fired at the Document object.

The body attribute, on getting, must return the body element of the document (either a body element, a frameset element, or null). On setting, the following algorithm must be run:

1. If the new value is not a body or frameset element, then raise a HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR exception and abort these steps.
2. Otherwise, if the new value is the same as the body element, do nothing. Abort these steps.
3. Otherwise, if the body element is not null, then replace that element with the new value in the DOM, as if the root element's replaceChild() method had been called with the new value and the incumbent body element as its two arguments respectively, then abort these steps.
4. Otherwise, the the body element is null. Append the new value to the root element.

The images attribute must return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only img elements.

The embeds attribute must return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only embed elements.

The plugins attribute must return the same object as that returned by the embeds attribute.

The links attribute must return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only a elements with href attributes and area elements with href attributes.

The forms attribute must return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only form elements.

The anchors attribute must return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only a elements with name attributes.

The scripts attribute must return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only script elements.

The getElementsByName(name) method takes a string name, and must return a live NodeList containing all the a, applet, button, form, frame, frameset, iframe, img, input, map, meta, object, select, and textarea elements in that document that have a name attribute whose value is equal to the name argument (in a case-sensitive manner), in tree order.

The getElementsByClassName(classNames) method takes a string that contains an unordered set of unique space-separated tokens representing classes. When called, the method must return a live NodeList object containing all the elements in the document, in tree order, that have all the classes specified in that argument, having obtained the classes by splitting a string on spaces. If there are no tokens specified in the argument, then the method must return an empty NodeList. If the document is in quirks mode, then the comparisons for the classes must be done in an ASCII case-insensitive manner, otherwise, the comparisons must be done in a case-sensitive manner.

The getElementsByClassName() method on the HTMLElement interface must return a live NodeList with the nodes that the HTMLDocument getElementsByClassName() method would return when passed the same argument(s), excluding any elements that are not descendants of the HTMLElement object on which the method was invoked.

HTML, SVG, and MathML elements define which classes they are in by having an attribute in the per-element partition with the name class containing a space-separated list of classes to which the element belongs. Other specifications may also allow elements in their namespaces to be labeled as being in specific classes.

<div id="example">
 <p id="p1" class="aaa bbb"/>
 <p id="p2" class="aaa ccc"/>
 <p id="p3" class="bbb ccc"/>
</div>

The HTMLDocument interface supports named properties. The names of the supported named properties at any moment consist of the values of the name content attributes of all the applet, embed, form, iframe, img, and fallback-free object elements in the Document that have name content attributes, and the values of the id content attributes of all the applet and fallback-free object elements in the Document that have id content attributes, and the values of the id content attributes of all the img elements in the Document that have both name content attributes and id content attributes.

When the HTMLDocument object is indexed for property retrieval using a name name, then the user agent must return the value obtained using the following steps:

1. Let elements be the list of named elements with the name name in the Document.

   There will be at least one such element, by definition.

2. If elements has only one element, and that element is an iframe element, then return the WindowProxy object of the nested browsing context represented by that iframe element, and abort these steps.

3. Otherwise, if elements has only one element, return that element and abort these steps.

4. Otherwise return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only named elements with the name name.

Named elements with the name name, for the purposes of the above algorithm, are those that are either:

• applet, embed, form, iframe, img, or fallback-free object elements that have a name content attribute whose value is name, or
• applet or fallback-free object elements that have an id content attribute whose value is name, or
• img elements that have an id content attribute whose value is name, and that have a name content attribute present also.

An object element is said to be fallback-free if it has no element descendants other than param elements, and no text node descendants that are not inter-element whitespace.

The dir attribute on the HTMLDocument interface is defined along with the dir content attribute.

Elements

Semantics

Elements, attributes, and attribute values in HTML are defined (by this specification) to have certain meanings (semantics). For example, the ol element represents an ordered list, and the lang attribute represents the language of the content.

Authors must not use elements, attributes, and attribute values for purposes other than their appropriate intended semantic purpose.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-GB">
 <head> <title> Demonstration </title> </head>
 <body>
  <table>
   <tr> <td> My favourite animal is the cat. </td> </tr>
   <tr>
    <td>
     —<a href="http://example.org/~ernest/"><cite>Ernest</cite></a>,
     in an essay from 1992
    </td>
   </tr>
  </table>
 </body>
</html>

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-GB">
 <head> <title> Demonstration </title> </head>
 <body>
  <blockquote>
   <p> My favourite animal is the cat. </p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>
   —<a href="http://example.org/~ernest/">Ernest</a>,
   in an essay from 1992
  </p>
 </body>
</html>

<body>
 <h1>ABC Company</h1>
 <h2>Leading the way in widget design since 1432</h2>
 ...

<body>
 <header>
  <h1>ABC Company</h1>
  <h2>Leading the way in widget design since 1432</h2>
 </header>
 ...

Through scripting and using other mechanisms, the values of attributes, text, and indeed the entire structure of the document may change dynamically while a user agent is processing it. The semantics of a document at an instant in time are those represented by the state of the document at that instant in time, and the semantics of a document can therefore change over time. User agents must update their presentation of the document as this occurs.

HTML has a progress element that describes a progress bar. If its "value" attribute is dynamically updated by a script, the UA would update the rendering to show the progress changing.

Elements in the DOM

The nodes representing HTML elements in the DOM must implement, and expose to scripts, the interfaces listed for them in the relevant sections of this specification. This includes HTML elements in XML documents, even when those documents are in another context (e.g. inside an XSLT transform).

Elements in the DOM represent things; that is, they have intrinsic meaning, also known as semantics.

For example, an ol element represents an ordered list.

The basic interface, from which all the HTML elements' interfaces inherit, and which must be used by elements that have no additional requirements, is the HTMLElement interface.

interface HTMLElement : Element {
  // DOM tree accessors
  NodeList getElementsByClassName(in DOMString classNames);

  // dynamic markup insertion
           attribute DOMString innerHTML;
           attribute DOMString outerHTML;
  void insertAdjacentHTML(in DOMString position, in DOMString text);

  // metadata attributes
           attribute DOMString id;
           attribute DOMString title;
           attribute DOMString lang;
           attribute DOMString dir;
           attribute DOMString className;

  // user interaction
  void click();
  void scrollIntoView();
  void scrollIntoView(in boolean top);
           attribute long tabIndex;
  void focus();
  void blur();
           attribute boolean draggable;
           attribute DOMString contentEditable;
  readonly attribute boolean isContentEditable;
           attribute HTMLMenuElement contextMenu;
           attribute boolean spellcheck;

  // styling
  readonly attribute CSSStyleDeclaration style;

  // event handler DOM attributes
           attribute Function onabort;
           attribute Function onblur;
           attribute Function onchange;
           attribute Function onclick;
           attribute Function oncontextmenu;
           attribute Function ondblclick;
           attribute Function ondrag;
           attribute Function ondragend;
           attribute Function ondragenter;
           attribute Function ondragleave;
           attribute Function ondragover;
           attribute Function ondragstart;
           attribute Function ondrop;
           attribute Function onerror;
           attribute Function onfocus;
           attribute Function onkeydown;
           attribute Function onkeypress;
           attribute Function onkeyup;
           attribute Function onload;
           attribute Function onmessage;
           attribute Function onmousedown;
           attribute Function onmousemove;
           attribute Function onmouseout;
           attribute Function onmouseover;
           attribute Function onmouseup;
           attribute Function onmousewheel;
           attribute Function onscroll;
           attribute Function onselect;
           attribute Function onsubmit;
};

The HTMLElement interface holds methods and attributes related to a number of disparate features, and the members of this interface are therefore described in various different sections of this specification.

Global attributes

The following attributes are common to and may be specified on all HTML elements (even those not defined in this specification):

Global attributes:

class

contenteditable

contextmenu

dir

id

lang

style

spellcheck

tabindex

title

In addition, unless otherwise specified, the following event handler content attributes may be specified on any HTML element:

Event handler content attributes:

onabort

onblur

onchange

onclick

oncontextmenu

ondblclick

ondrag

ondragend

ondragenter

ondragleave

ondragover

ondragstart

ondrop

onerror*

onfocus

onkeydown

onkeypress

onkeyup

onload*

onmessage*

onmousedown

onmousemove

onmouseout

onmouseover

onmouseup

onmousewheel

onscroll

onselect

onsubmit

The attributes marked with an asterisk cannot be specified on body elements as those elements expose event handler attributes of the Window object with the same names.

Also, custom data attributes (e.g. data-foldername or data-msgid) can be specified on any HTML element, to store custom data specific to the page.

In HTML documents, elements in the HTML namespace may have an xmlns attribute specified, if, and only if, it has the exact value "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml". This does not apply to XML documents.

In HTML, the xmlns attribute has absolutely no effect. It is basically a talisman. It is allowed merely to make migration to and from XHTML mildly easier. When parsed by an HTML parser, the attribute ends up in no namespace, not the "http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/" namespace like namespace declaration attributes in XML do.

In XML, an xmlns attribute is part of the namespace declaration mechanism, and an element cannot actually have an xmlns attribute in no namespace specified.

The id attribute

The id attribute represents its element's unique identifier. The value must be unique in the element's home subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not contain any space characters.

If the value is not the empty string, user agents must associate the element with the given value (exactly, including any space characters) for the purposes of ID matching within the element's home subtree (e.g. for selectors in CSS or for the getElementById() method in the DOM).

Identifiers are opaque strings. Particular meanings should not be derived from the value of the id attribute.

This specification doesn't preclude an element having multiple IDs, if other mechanisms (e.g. DOM Core methods) can set an element's ID in a way that doesn't conflict with the id attribute.

The id DOM attribute must reflect the id content attribute.

The title attribute

The title attribute represents advisory information for the element, such as would be appropriate for a tooltip. On a link, this could be the title or a description of the target resource; on an image, it could be the image credit or a description of the image; on a paragraph, it could be a footnote or commentary on the text; on a citation, it could be further information about the source; and so forth. The value is text.

If this attribute is omitted from an element, then it implies that the title attribute of the nearest ancestor HTML element with a title attribute set is also relevant to this element. Setting the attribute overrides this, explicitly stating that the advisory information of any ancestors is not relevant to this element. Setting the attribute to the empty string indicates that the element has no advisory information.

If the title attribute's value contains U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters, the content is split into multiple lines. Each U+000A LINE FEED (LF) character represents a line break.

Some elements, such as link, abbr, and input, define additional semantics for the title attribute beyond the semantics described above.

The title DOM attribute must reflect the title content attribute.

The lang and xml:lang attributes

The lang attribute specifies the primary language for the element's contents and for any of the element's attributes that contain text. Its value must be a valid RFC 3066 language code, or the empty string. [RFC3066]

The xml:lang attribute (that is, the lang attribute with the xml prefix in the http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace namespace) is defined in XML. [XML]

If these attributes are omitted from an element, then the language of this element is the same as the language of its parent element, if any. Setting the attribute to the empty string indicates that the primary language is unknown.

The lang attribute may be used on any HTML element.

The xml:lang attribute may be used on HTML elements in XML documents, as well as elements in other namespaces if the relevant specifications allow it (in particular, MathML and SVG allow xml:lang attributes to be specified on their elements). If both the lang attribute and the xml:lang attribute are specified on the same element, they must have exactly the same value when compared in an ASCII case-insensitive manner.

Authors must not use the xml:lang attribute (that is, the lang attribute with the xml prefix in the http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace namespace) in HTML documents. To ease migration to and from XHTML, authors may specify an attribute in no namespace with no prefix and with the localname xml:lang on HTML elements in HTML documents, but such attributes must only be specified if a lang attribute is also specified, and both attributes must have the same value when compared in an ASCII case-insensitive manner.

To determine the language of a node, user agents must look at the nearest ancestor element (including the element itself if the node is an element) that has an xml:lang attribute set or is an HTML element and has a lang attribute set. That attribute specifies the language of the node.

If both the xml:lang attribute and the lang attribute are set on an element, user agents must use the xml:lang attribute, and the lang attribute must be ignored for the purposes of determining the element's language.

If no explicit language is given for the root element, but there is a document-wide default language set, then that is the language of the node.

If there is no document-wide default language, then language information from a higher-level protocol (such as HTTP), if any, must be used as the final fallback language. In the absence of any language information, the default value is unknown (the empty string).

If the resulting value is not a recognised language code, then it must be treated as an unknown language (as if the value was the empty string).

User agents may use the element's language to determine proper processing or rendering (e.g. in the selection of appropriate fonts or pronunciations, or for dictionary selection).

The lang DOM attribute must reflect the lang content attribute.

The xml:base attribute (XML only)

The xml:base attribute is defined in XML Base. [XMLBASE]

The xml:base attribute may be used on elements of XML documents. Authors must not use the xml:base attribute in HTML documents.

The dir attribute

The dir attribute specifies the element's text directionality. The attribute is an enumerated attribute with the keyword ltr mapping to the state ltr, and the keyword rtl mapping to the state rtl. The attribute has no defaults.

The processing of this attribute is primarily performed by the presentation layer. For example, the rendering section in this specification defines a mapping from this attribute to the CSS 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties, and CSS defines rendering in terms of those properties.

The directionality of an element, which is used in particular by the canvas element's text rendering API, is either 'ltr' or 'rtl'. If the user agent supports CSS and the 'direction' property on this element has a computed value of either 'ltr' or 'rtl', then that is the directionality of the element. Otherwise, if the element is being rendered, then the directionality of the element is the directionality used by the presentation layer, potentially determined from the value of the dir attribute on the element. Otherwise, if the element's dir attribute has the state ltr, the element's directionality is 'ltr' (left-to-right); if the attribute has the state rtl, the element's directionality is 'rtl' (right-to-left); and oherwise, the element's directionality is the same as its parent element, or 'ltr' if there is no parent element.

The dir DOM attribute on an element must reflect the dir content attribute of that element, limited to only known values.

The dir DOM attribute on HTMLDocument objects must reflect the dir content attribute of the html element, if any, limited to only known values. If there is no such element, then the attribute must return the empty string and do nothing on setting.

Authors are strongly encouraged to use the dir attribute to indicate text direction rather than using CSS, since that way their documents will continue to render correctly even in the absence of CSS (e.g. as interpreted by search engines).

The class attribute

Every HTML element may have a class attribute specified.

The attribute, if specified, must have a value that is an unordered set of unique space-separated tokens representing the various classes that the element belongs to.

The classes that an HTML element has assigned to it consists of all the classes returned when the value of the class attribute is split on spaces.

Assigning classes to an element affects class matching in selectors in CSS, the getElementsByClassName() method in the DOM, and other such features.

Authors may use any value in the class attribute, but are encouraged to use the values that describe the nature of the content, rather than values that describe the desired presentation of the content.

The style attribute

All elements may have the style content attribute set. If specified, the attribute must contain only a list of zero or more semicolon-separated (;) CSS declarations. [CSS21]

In user agents that support CSS, the attribute's value must be parsed when the attribute is added or has its value changed, with its value treated as the body (the part inside the curly brackets) of a declaration block in a rule whose selector matches just the element on which the attribute is set. All URLs in the value must be resolved relative to the element when the attribute is parsed. For the purposes of the CSS cascade, the attribute must be considered to be a 'style' attribute at the author level.

Documents that use style attributes on any of their elements must still be comprehensible and usable if those attributes were removed.

In particular, using the style attribute to hide and show content, or to convey meaning that is otherwise not included in the document, is non-conforming.

The style DOM attribute must return a CSSStyleDeclaration whose value represents the declarations specified in the attribute, if present. Mutating the CSSStyleDeclaration object must create a style attribute on the element (if there isn't one already) and then change its value to be a value representing the serialized form of the CSSStyleDeclaration object. [CSSOM]

<p>My sweat suit is <span style="color: green; background:
transparent">green</span> and my eyes are <span style="color: blue;
background: transparent">blue</span>.</p>

Content models

All the elements in this specification have a defined content model, which describes what nodes are allowed inside the elements, and thus what the structure of an HTML document or fragment must look like.

As noted in the conformance and terminology sections, for the purposes of determining if an element matches its content model or not, CDATASection nodes in the DOM are treated as equivalent to Text nodes, and entity reference nodes are treated as if they were expanded in place.

The space characters are always allowed between elements. User agents represent these characters between elements in the source markup as text nodes in the DOM. Empty text nodes and text nodes consisting of just sequences of those characters are considered inter-element whitespace.

Inter-element whitespace, comment nodes, and processing instruction nodes must be ignored when establishing whether an element matches its content model or not, and must be ignored when following algorithms that define document and element semantics.

An element A is said to be preceded or followed by a second element B if A and B have the same parent node and there are no other element nodes or text nodes (other than inter-element whitespace) between them.

Authors must not use elements in the HTML namespace anywhere except where they are explicitly allowed, as defined for each element, or as explicitly required by other specifications. For XML compound documents, these contexts could be inside elements from other namespaces, if those elements are defined as providing the relevant contexts.

In addition, elements in the HTML namespace may be orphan nodes (i.e. without a parent node).

var data = {
  name: "Banana",
  cell: document.createElement('td'), 
};

Kinds of content

Each element in HTML falls into zero or more categories that group elements with similar characteristics together. The following broad categories are used in this specification:

• Metadata content
• Flow content
• Sectioning content
• Heading content
• Phrasing content
• Embedded content
• Interactive content

These categories are related as follows:

In addition, certain elements are categorised as form-associated elements and further subcategorised so so to define their role in various form-related processing models.

Some elements have unique requirements and do not fit into any particular category.

Metadata content

Metadata content is content that sets up the presentation or behavior of the rest of the content, or that sets up the relationship of the document with other documents, or that conveys other "out of band" information.

Flow content

Most elements that are used in the body of documents and applications are categorized as flow content.

As a general rule, elements whose content model allows any flow content should have either at least one descendant text node that is not inter-element whitespace, or at least one descendant element node that is embedded content. For the purposes of this requirement, del elements and their descendants must not be counted as contributing to the ancestors of the del element.

This requirement is not a hard requirement, however, as there are many cases where an element can be empty legitimately, for example when it is used as a placeholder which will later be filled in by a script, or when the element is part of a template and would on most pages be filled in but on some pages is not relevant.

Sectioning content

Sectioning content is content that defines the scope of headers, footers, and contact information.

Each sectioning content element potentially has a heading and an outline. See the section on headings and sections for further details.

There are also certain elements that are sectioning roots. These are distinct from sectioning content, but they can also have an outline.

Heading content

Heading content defines the header of a section (whether explicitly marked up using sectioning content elements, or implied by the heading content itself).

Phrasing content

Phrasing content is the text of the document, as well as elements that mark up that text at the intra-paragraph level. Runs of phrasing content form paragraphs.

As a general rule, elements whose content model allows any phrasing content should have either at least one descendant text node that is not inter-element whitespace, or at least one descendant element node that is embedded content. For the purposes of this requirement, nodes that are descendants of del elements must not be counted as contributing to the ancestors of the del element.

Most elements that are categorized as phrasing content can only contain elements that are themselves categorized as phrasing content, not any flow content.

Text nodes that are not inter-element whitespace are phrasing content.

Embedded content

Embedded content is content that imports another resource into the document, or content from another vocabulary that is inserted into the document.

Elements that are from namespaces other than the HTML namespace and that convey content but not metadata, are embedded content for the purposes of the content models defined in this specification. (For example, MathML, or SVG.)

Some embedded content elements can have fallback content: content that is to be used when the external resource cannot be used (e.g. because it is of an unsupported format). The element definitions state what the fallback is, if any.

Interactive content

Interactive content is content that is specifically intended for user interaction.

Certain elements in HTML have an activation behavior, which means the user agent should allow the user to manually trigger them in some way, for instance using keyboard or voice input, or through mouse clicks. When the user triggers an element with a defined activation behavior in a manner other than clicking it, the default action of the interaction event must be to run synthetic click activation steps on the element.

When a user agent is to run synthetic click activation steps on an element, the user agent must run pre-click activation steps on the element, then fire a click event at the element. The default action of this click event must be to run post-click activation steps on the element. If the event is canceled, the user agent must run canceled activation steps on the element instead.

Given an element target, the nearest activatable element is the element returned by the following algorithm:

1. If target has a defined activation behavior, then return target and abort these steps.

2. If target has a parent element, then set target to that parent element and return to the first step.

3. Otherwise, there is no nearest activatable element.

When a pointing device is clicked, the user agent must run these steps:

1. Let e be the nearest activatable element of the element designated by the user, if any.

2. If there is an element e, run pre-click activation steps on it.

3. Dispatching the required click event.

   Another specification presumably requires the firing of the click event?

   If there is an element e, then the default action of the click event must be to run post-click activation steps on element e.

   If there is an element e but the event is canceled, the user agent must run canceled activation steps on element e.

The above doesn't happen for arbitrary synthetic events dispatched by author script. However, the click() method can be used to make it happen programmatically.

When a user agent is to run post-click activation steps on an element, the user agent must fire a simple event called DOMActivate at that element. The default action of this event must be to run final activation steps on that element. If the event is canceled, the user agent must run canceled activation steps on the element instead.

When a user agent is to run pre-click activation steps on an element, it must run the pre-click activation steps defined for that element, if any.

When a user agent is to run canceled activation steps on an element, it must run the canceled activation steps defined for that element, if any.

When a user agent is to run final activation steps on an element, it must run the activation behavior defined for that element. Activation behaviors can refer to the click and DOMActivate events that were fired by the steps above leading up to this point.

Transparent content models

Some elements are described as transparent; they have "transparent" in the description of their content model.

When a content model includes a part that is "transparent", those parts must not contain content that would not be conformant if all transparent elements in the tree were replaced, in their parent element, by the children in the "transparent" part of their content model, retaining order.

When a transparent element has no parent, then the part of its content model that is "transparent" must instead be treated as accepting any flow content.

Paragraphs

A paragraph is typically a block of text with one or more sentences that discuss a particular topic, as in typography, but can also be used for more general thematic grouping. For instance, an address is also a paragraph, as is a part of a form, a byline, or a stanza in a poem.

Paragraphs in flow content are defined relative to what the document looks like without the a, ins and del elements complicating matters, since those elements, with their hybrid content models, can straddle paragraph boundaries.

Let view be a view of the DOM that replaces all a, ins and del elements in the document with their contents. Then, in view, for each run of phrasing content uninterrupted by other types of content, in an element that accepts content other than phrasing content, let first be the first node of the run, and let last be the last node of the run. For each run, a paragraph exists in the original DOM from immediately before first to immediately after last. (Paragraphs can thus span across a, ins and del elements.)

A paragraph is also formed explicitly by p elements.

The p element can be used to wrap individual paragraphs when there would otherwise not be any content other than phrasing content to separate the paragraphs from each other.

<section>
  <h1>Example of paragraphs</h1>
  This is the <em>first</em> paragraph in this example.
  <p>This is the second.</p>
  <!-- This is not a paragraph. -->
</section>

<section>
  <ins><h1>Example of paragraphs</h1>
  This is the <em>first</em> paragraph in</ins> this example<del>.
  <p>This is the second.</p></del>
  <!-- This is not a paragraph. -->
</section>

<aside>
 Welcome!
 <a href="about.html">
  This is home of...
  <h1>The Falcons!</h1>
  The Lockheed Martin multirole jet fighter aircraft!
 </a>
 This page discusses the F-16 Fighting Falcon's innermost secrets.
</aside>

<aside>
 <p>Welcome! <a href="about.html">This is home of...</a></p>
 <h1><a href="about.html">The Falcons!</a></h1>
 <p><a href="about.html">The Lockheed Martin multirole jet
 fighter aircraft!</a> This page discusses the F-16 Fighting
 Falcon's innermost secrets.</p>
</aside>

Generally, having elements straddle paragraph boundaries is best avoided. Maintaining such markup can be difficult.

APIs in HTML documents

For HTML documents, and for HTML elements in HTML documents, certain APIs defined in DOM3 Core become case-insensitive or case-changing, as sometimes defined in DOM3 Core, and as summarized or required below. [DOM3CORE].

This does not apply to XML documents or to elements that are not in the HTML namespace despite being in HTML documents.

Element.tagName and Node.nodeName

These attributes must return element names converted to uppercase, regardless of the case with which they were created.

Document.createElement()

The canonical form of HTML markup is all-lowercase; thus, this method will lowercase the argument before creating the requisite element. Also, the element created must be in the HTML namespace.

This doesn't apply to Document.createElementNS(). Thus, it is possible, by passing this last method a tag name in the wrong case, to create an element that claims to have the tag name of an element defined in this specification, but doesn't support its interfaces, because it really has another tag name not accessible from the DOM APIs.

Element.setAttributeNode()

When an Attr node is set on an HTML element, it must have its name converted to lowercase before the element is affected.

This doesn't apply to Document.setAttributeNodeNS().

Element.setAttribute()

When an attribute is set on an HTML element, the name argument must be converted to lowercas before the element is affected.

This doesn't apply to Document.setAttributeNS().

Document.getElementsByTagName() and Element.getElementsByTagName()

These methods (but not their namespaced counterparts) must compare the given argument in an ASCII case-insensitive manner when looking at HTML elements, and in a case-sensitive manner otherwise.

Thus, in an HTML document with nodes in multiple namespaces, these methods will be both case-sensitive and case-insensitive at the same time.

Document.renameNode()

If the new namespace is the HTML namespace, then the new qualified name must be converted to lowercase before the rename takes place.

Dynamic markup insertion

APIs for dynamically inserting markup into the document interact with the parser, and thus their behavior, varies depending on whether they are used with HTML documents (and the HTML parser) or XHTML in XML documents (and the XML parser).

Controlling the input stream

The open() method comes in several variants with different numbers of arguments.

When called with two or fewer arguments, the method must act as follows:

1. Let type be the value of the first argument, if there is one, or "text/html" otherwise.

2. Let replace be true if there is a second argument and it is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the value "replace", and false otherwise.

3. If the document has an active parser that isn't a script-created parser, and the insertion point associated with that parser's input stream is not undefined (that is, it does point to somewhere in the input stream), then the method does nothing. Abort these steps and return the Document object on which the method was invoked.

   This basically causes document.open() to be ignored when it's called in an inline script found during the parsing of data sent over the network, while still letting it have an effect when called asynchronously or on a document that is itself being spoon-fed using these APIs.

4. Unload the Document object, with the recycle parameter set to true. If the user refused to allow the document to be unloaded, then these steps must be aborted.

5. If the document has an active parser, then stop that parser, and throw away any pending content in the input stream. what about if it doesn't, because it's either like a text/plain, or Atom, or PDF, or XHTML, or image document, or something?

6. Unregister all event listeners registered on the Document node and its descendants.

7. Remove all child nodes of the document, without firing any mutation events.

8. Replace the Document's singleton objects with new instances of those objects. (This includes in particular the Window, Location, History, ApplicationCache, UndoManager, Navigator, and Selection objects, the various BarProp objects, the two Storage objects, and the various HTMLCollection objects. It also includes all the WebIDL prototypes in the ECMAScript binding, including the Document object's prototype.)

9. Change the document's character encoding to UTF-16.

10. Change the document's address to the first script's browsing context's active document's address.

11. Create a new HTML parser and associate it with the document. This is a script-created parser (meaning that it can be closed by the document.open() and document.close() methods, and that the tokeniser will wait for an explicit call to document.close() before emitting an end-of-file token). The encoding confidence is irrelevant.

12. Mark the document as being an HTML document (it might already be so-marked).

13. If the type string contains a U+003B SEMICOLON (;) character, remove the first such character and all characters from it up to the end of the string.

    Strip all leading and trailing space characters from type.

    If type is not now an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "text/html", then act as if the tokeniser had emitted a start tag token with the tag name "pre", then set the HTML parser's tokenization stage's content model flag to PLAINTEXT.

14. If replace is false, then:

    1. Remove all the entries in the browsing context's session history after the current entry in its Document's History object
    2. Remove any earlier entries that share the same Document
    3. Add a new entry just before the last entry that is associated with the text that was parsed by the previous parser associated with the Document object, as well as the state of the document at the start of these steps. (This allows the user to step backwards in the session history to see the page before it was blown away by the document.open() call.)

15. Finally, set the insertion point to point at just before the end of the input stream (which at this point will be empty).

16. Return the Document on which the method was invoked.

When called with three or more arguments, the open() method on the HTMLDocument object must call the open() method on the Window object of the HTMLDocument object, with the same arguments as the original call to the open() method, and return whatever that method returned. If the HTMLDocument object has no Window object, then the method must raise an INVALID_ACCESS_ERR exception.

The close() method must do nothing if there is no script-created parser associated with the document. If there is such a parser, then, when the method is called, the user agent must insert an explicit "EOF" character at the end of the parser's input stream.

document.write()

The document.write(...) method must act as follows:

1. If the method was invoked on an XML document, throw an INVALID_ACCESS_ERR exception and abort these steps.

2. If the insertion point is undefined, the open() method must be called (with no arguments) on the document object. If the user refused to allow the document to be unloaded, then these steps must be aborted. Otherwise, the insertion point will point at just before the end of the (empty) input stream.

3. The string consisting of the concatenation of all the arguments to the method must be inserted into the input stream just before the insertion point.

4. If there is a pending external script, then the method must now return without further processing of the input stream.

5. Otherwise, the tokeniser must process the characters that were inserted, one at a time, processing resulting tokens as they are emitted, and stopping when the tokeniser reaches the insertion point or when the processing of the tokeniser is aborted by the tree construction stage (this can happen if a script end tag token is emitted by the tokeniser).

   If the document.write() method was called from script executing inline (i.e. executing because the parser parsed a set of script tags), then this is a reentrant invocation of the parser.

6. Finally, the method must return.

document.writeln()

The document.writeln(...) method, when invoked, must act as if the document.write() method had been invoked with the same argument(s), plus an extra argument consisting of a string containing a single line feed character (U+000A).

innerHTML

The innerHTML DOM attribute represents the markup of the node's contents.

On getting, if the node's document is an HTML document, then the attribute must return the result of running the HTML fragment serialization algorithm on the node; otherwise, the node's document is an XML document, and the attribute must return the result of running the XML fragment serialization algorithm on the node instead (this might raise an exception instead of returning a string).

On setting, the following steps must be run:

1. If the node's document is an HTML document: Invoke the HTML fragment parsing algorithm.

   If the node's document is an XML document: Invoke the XML fragment parsing algorithm.

   In either case, the algorithm must be invoked with the string being assigned into the innerHTML attribute as the input. If the node is an Element node, then, in addition, that element must be passed as the context element.

   If this raises an exception, then abort these steps.

   Otherwise, let new children be the nodes returned.

2. If the attribute is being set on a Document node, and that document has an active HTML parser or XML parser, then stop that parser.

   what about if it doesn't, because it's either like a text/plain, or Atom, or PDF, or XHTML, or image document, or something?

3. Remove the child nodes of the node whose innerHTML attribute is being set.

4. If the attribute is being set on a Document node, let target document be that Document node. Otherwise, the attribute is being set on an Element node; let target document be the ownerDocument of that Element.

5. Set the ownerDocument of all the nodes in new children to the target document.

6. Append all the new children nodes to the node whose innerHTML attribute is being set, preserving their order, without firing any mutation events.

outerHTML

The outerHTML DOM attribute represents the markup of the element and its contents.

On getting, if the node's document is an HTML document, then the attribute must return the result of running the HTML fragment serialization algorithm on a fictional node whose only child is the node on which the attribute was invoked; otherwise, the node's document is an XML document, and the attribute must return the result of running the XML fragment serialization algorithm on that fictional node instead (this might raise an exception instead of returning a string).

On setting, the following steps must be run:

1. Let target be the element whose outerHTML attribute is being set.

2. If target has no parent node, then abort these steps. There would be no way to obtain a reference to the nodes created even if the remaining steps were run.

3. If target's parent node is a Document object, throw a NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR exception and abort these steps.

4. Let parent be target's parent node, unless that is a DocumentFragment node, in which case let parent be an arbitrary body element.

5. If target's document is an HTML document: Invoke the HTML fragment parsing algorithm.

   If target's document is an XML document: Invoke the XML fragment parsing algorithm.

   In either case, the algorithm must be invoked with the string being assigned into the outerHTML attribute as the input, and parent as the context element.

   If this raises an exception, then abort these steps.

   Otherwise, let new children be targets returned.

6. Set the ownerDocument of all the nodes in new children to target's document.

7. Remove target from its parent node and insert in its place all the new children nodes, preserving their order, without firing any mutation events.

insertAdjacentHTML()

The insertAdjacentHTML(position, text) method, when invoked, must run the following algorithm:

1. Let position and text be the method's first and second arguments, respectively.

2. Let target be the element on which the method was invoked.

3. Use the first matching item from this list:

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "beforebegin"

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "afterend"

   If target has no parent node, then abort these steps.

   If target's parent node is a Document object, then throw a NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR exception and abort these steps.

   Otherwise, let context be the parent node of target.

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "afterbegin"

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "beforeend"

   Let context be the same as target.

   Otherwise

   Throw a SYNTAX_ERR exception.

4. If target's document is an HTML document: Invoke the HTML fragment parsing algorithm.

   If target's document is an XML document: Invoke the XML fragment parsing algorithm.

   In either case, the algorithm must be invoked with text as the input, and the element selected in by the previous step as the context element.

   If this raises an exception, then abort these steps.

   Otherwise, let new children be targets returned.

5. Set the ownerDocument of all the nodes in new children to target's document.

6. Use the first matching item from this list:

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "beforebegin"

   Insert all the new children nodes immediately before target, preserving their order.

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "afterbegin"

   Insert all the new children nodes before the first child of target, if there is one, preserving their order. If there is no such child, append them all to target, preserving their order.

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "beforeend"

   Append all the new children nodes to target, preserving their order.

   If position is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "afterend"

   Insert all the new children nodes immediately after target, preserving their order.

   The above mutations must be performed without firing any mutation events.

The elements of HTML

The root element

The html element

Categories

None.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

As the root element of a document.

Wherever a subdocument fragment is allowed in a compound document.

Content model:

A head element followed by a body element.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

manifest

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The html element represents the root of an HTML document.

The manifest attribute gives the address of the document's application cache manifest, if there is one. If the attribute is present, the attribute's value must be a valid URL.

The manifest attribute only has an effect during the early stages of document load. Changing the attribute dynamically thus has no effect (and thus, no DOM API is provided for this attribute).

For the purposes of application cache selection, later base elements cannot affect the resolving of relative URLs in manifest attributes, as the attributes are processed before those elements are seen.

Document metadata

The head element

Categories

None.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

As the first element in an html element.

Content model:

One or more elements of metadata content, of which exactly one is a title element.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The head element represents a collection of metadata for the Document.

The title element

Categories

Metadata content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

In a head element containing no other title elements.

Content model:

Text.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The title element represents the document's title or name. Authors should use titles that identify their documents even when they are used out of context, for example in a user's history or bookmarks, or in search results. The document's title is often different from its first header, since the first header does not have to stand alone when taken out of context.

There must be no more than one title element per document.

The title element must not contain any elements.

  <title>Introduction to The Mating Rituals of Bees</title>
    ...
  <h1>Introduction</h1>
  <p>This companion guide to the highly successful
  <cite>Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping</cite> book is...

  <title>Dances used during bee mating rituals</title>
    ...
  <h1>The Dances</h1>

The string to use as the document's title is given by the document.title DOM attribute. User agents should use the document's title when referring to the document in their user interface.

The base element

Categories

Metadata content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

In a head element containing no other base elements.

Content model:

Empty.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

href

target

DOM interface:

interface HTMLBaseElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute DOMString href;
           attribute DOMString target;
};

The base element allows authors to specify the document base URL for the purposes of resolving relative URLs, and the name of the default browsing context for the purposes of following hyperlinks. The element does not represent any content beyond this information.

There must be no more than one base element per document.

A base element must have either an href attribute, a target attribute, or both.

The href content attribute, if specified, must contain a valid URL.

A base element, if it has an href attribute, must come before any other elements in the tree that have attributes defined as taking URLs, except the html element (its manifest attribute isn't affected by base elements).

If there are multiple base elements with href attributes, all but the first are ignored.

The target attribute, if specified, must contain a valid browsing context name or keyword. User agents use this name when following hyperlinks.

A base element, if it has a target attribute, must come before any elements in the tree that represent hyperlinks.

If there are multiple base elements with target attributes, all but the first are ignored.

The href and target DOM attributes must reflect the respective content attributes of the same name.

The link element

Categories

Metadata content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where metadata content is expected.

In a noscript element that is a child of a head element.

Content model:

Empty.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

href

rel

media

hreflang

type

sizes

Also, the title attribute has special semantics on this element.

DOM interface:

interface HTMLLinkElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute boolean disabled;
           attribute DOMString href;
           attribute DOMString rel;
           attribute DOMString media;
           attribute DOMString hreflang;
           attribute DOMString type;
           attribute DOMString sizes;
};

The LinkStyle interface must also be implemented by this element, the styling processing model defines how. [CSSOM]

The link element allows authors to link their document to other resources.

The destination of the link(s) is given by the href attribute, which must be present and must contain a valid URL. If the href attribute is absent, then the element does not define a link.

The types of link indicated (the relationships) are given by the value of the rel attribute, which must be present, and must have a value that is a set of space-separated tokens. The allowed values and their meanings are defined in a later section. If the rel attribute is absent, or if the values used are not allowed according to the definitions in this specification, then the element does not define a link.

Two categories of links can be created using the link element. Links to external resources are links to resources that are to be used to augment the current document, and hyperlink links are links to other documents. The link types section defines whether a particular link type is an external resource or a hyperlink. One element can create multiple links (of which some might be external resource links and some might be hyperlinks); exactly which and how many links are created depends on the keywords given in the rel attribute. User agents must process the links on a per-link basis, not a per-element basis.

Each link is handled separately. For instance, if there are two link elements with rel="stylesheet", they each count as a separate external resource, and each is affected by its own attributes independently.

The exact behavior for links to external resources depends on the exact relationship, as defined for the relevant link type. Some of the attributes control whether or not the external resource is to be applied (as defined below). For external resources that are represented in the DOM (for example, style sheets), the DOM representation must be made available even if the resource is not applied. To obtain the resource, the user agent must resolve the URL given by the href attribute, relative to the element, and then fetch the resulting absolute URL. User agents may opt to only fetch such resources when they are needed, instead of pro-actively fetching all the external resources that are not applied.

The semantics of the protocol used (e.g. HTTP) must be followed when fetching external resources. (For example, redirects must be followed and 404 responses must cause the external resource to not be applied.)

Interactive user agents should provide users with a means to follow the hyperlinks created using the link element, somewhere within their user interface. The exact interface is not defined by this specification, but it should include the following information (obtained from the element's attributes, again as defined below), in some form or another (possibly simplified), for each hyperlink created with each link element in the document:

• The relationship between this document and the resource (given by the rel attribute)
• The title of the resource (given by the title attribute).
• The address of the resource (given by the href attribute).
• The language of the resource (given by the hreflang attribute).
• The optimum media for the resource (given by the media attribute).

User agents may also include other information, such as the type of the resource (as given by the type attribute).

Hyperlinks created with the link element and its rel attribute apply to the whole page. This contrasts with the rel attribute of a and area elements, which indicates the type of a link whose context is given by the link's location within the document.

The media attribute says which media the resource applies to. The value must be a valid media query. [MQ]

If the link is a hyperlink then the media attribute is purely advisory, and describes for which media the document in question was designed.

However, if the link is an external resource link, then the media attribute is prescriptive. The user agent must apply the external resource to views while their state match the listed media and the other relevant conditions apply, and must not apply them otherwise.

The external resource might have further restrictions defined within that limit its applicability. For example, a CSS style sheet might have some @media blocks. This specification does not override such further restrictions or requirements.

The default, if the media attribute is omitted, is all, meaning that by default links apply to all media.

The hreflang attribute on the link element has the same semantics as the hreflang attribute on hyperlink elements.

The type attribute gives the MIME type of the linked resource. It is purely advisory. The value must be a valid MIME type, optionally with parameters. [RFC2046]

For external resource links, the type attribute is used as a hint to user agents so that they can avoid fetching resources they do not support. If the attribute is present, then the user agent must assume that the resource is of the given type. If the attribute is omitted, but the external resource link type has a default type defined, then the user agent must assume that the resource is of that type. If the UA does not support the given MIME type for the given link relationship, then the UA should not fetch the resource; if the UA does support the given MIME type for the given link relationship, then the UA should fetch the resource. If the attribute is omitted, and the external resource link type does not have a default type defined, but the user agent would fetch the resource if the type was known and supported, then the user agent should fetch the resource under the assumption that it will be supported.

User agents must not consider the type attribute authoritative — upon fetching the resource, user agents must not use the type attribute to determine its actual type. Only the actual type (as defined in the next paragraph) is used to determine whether to apply the resource, not the aforementioned assumed type.

If the resource is expected to be an image, user agents may apply the image sniffing rules, with the official type being the type determined from the resource's Content-Type metadata, and use the resulting sniffed type of the resource as if it was the actual type. Otherwise, if the resource is not expected to be an image, or if the user agent opts not to apply those rules, then the user agent must use the resource's Content-Type metadata to determine the type of the resource. If there is no type metadata, but the external resource link type has a default type defined, then the user agent must assume that the resource is of that type.

Once the user agent has established the type of the resource, the user agent must apply the resource if it is of a supported type and the other relevant conditions apply, and must ignore the resource otherwise.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="A" type="text/plain">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="B" type="text/css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="C">

The title attribute gives the title of the link. With one exception, it is purely advisory. The value is text. The exception is for style sheet links, where the title attribute defines alternative style sheet sets.

The title attribute on link elements differs from the global title attribute of most other elements in that a link without a title does not inherit the title of the parent element: it merely has no title.

The sizes attribute is used with the icon link type. The attribute must not be specified on link elements that do not have a rel attribute that specifies the icon keyword.

Some versions of HTTP defined a Link: header, to be processed like a series of link elements. If supported, for the purposes of ordering links defined by HTTP headers must be assumed to come before any links in the document, in the order that they were given in the HTTP entity header. (URIs in these headers are to be processed and resolved according to the rules given in HTTP; the rules of this specification don't apply.) [RFC2616] [RFC2068]

The DOM attributes href, rel, media, hreflang, and type, and sizes each must reflect the respective content attributes of the same name.

The DOM attribute disabled only applies to style sheet links. When the link element defines a style sheet link, then the disabled attribute behaves as defined for the alternative style sheets DOM. For all other link elements it always return false and does nothing on setting.

The meta element

Categories

Metadata content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

If the charset attribute is present, or if the element is in the Encoding declaration state: in a head element.

If the http-equiv attribute is present, and the element is not in the Encoding declaration state: in a head element.

If the http-equiv attribute is present, and the element is not in the Encoding declaration state: in a noscript element that is a child of a head element.

If the name attribute is present: where metadata content is expected.

Content model:

Empty.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

name

http-equiv

content

charset (HTML only)

DOM interface:

interface HTMLMetaElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute DOMString content;
           attribute DOMString name;
           attribute DOMString httpEquiv;
};

The meta element represents various kinds of metadata that cannot be expressed using the title, base, link, style, and script elements.

The meta element can represent document-level metadata with the name attribute, pragma directives with the http-equiv attribute, and the file's character encoding declaration when an HTML document is serialized to string form (e.g. for transmission over the network or for disk storage) with the charset attribute.

Exactly one of the name, http-equiv, and charset attributes must be specified.

If either name or http-equiv is specified, then the content attribute must also be specified. Otherwise, it must be omitted.

The charset attribute specifies the character encoding used by the document. This is called a character encoding declaration.

The charset attribute may be specified in HTML documents only, it must not be used in XML documents. There must not be more than one element with a charset attribute per document.

The content attribute gives the value of the document metadata or pragma directive when the element is used for those purposes. The allowed values depend on the exact context, as described in subsequent sections of this specification.

If a meta element has a name attribute, it sets document metadata. Document metadata is expressed in terms of name/value pairs, the name attribute on the meta element giving the name, and the content attribute on the same element giving the value. The name specifies what aspect of metadata is being set; valid names and the meaning of their values are described in the following sections. If a meta element has no content attribute, then the value part of the metadata name/value pair is the empty string.

If a meta element has the http-equiv attribute specified, it must be either in a head element or in a noscript element that itself is in a head element. If a meta element does not have the http-equiv attribute specified, it must be in a head element.

The DOM attributes name and content must reflect the respective content attributes of the same name. The DOM attribute httpEquiv must reflect the content attribute http-equiv.

Standard metadata names

This specification defines a few names for the name attribute of the meta element.

application-name

The value must be a short free-form string that giving the name of the Web application that the page represents. If the page is not a Web application, the application-name metadata name must not be used. User agents may use the application name in UI in preference to the page's title, since the title might include status messages and the like relevant to the status of the page at a particular moment in time instead of just being the name of the application.

description

The value must be a free-form string that describes the page. The value must be appropriate for use in a directory of pages, e.g. in a search engine.

generator

The value must be a free-form string that identifies the software used to generate the document. This value must not be used on hand-authored pages.

Other metadata names

Extensions to the predefined set of metadata names may be registered in the WHATWG Wiki MetaExtensions page.

Anyone is free to edit the WHATWG Wiki MetaExtensions page at any time to add a type. These new names must be specified with the following information:

Keyword

The actual name being defined. The name should not be confusingly similar to any other defined name (e.g. differing only in case).

Brief description

A short description of what the metadata name's meaning is, including the format the value is required to be in.

Link to more details

A link to a more detailed description of the metadata name's semantics and requirements. It could be another page on the Wiki, or a link to an external page.

Synonyms

A list of other names that have exactly the same processing requirements. Authors should not use the names defined to be synonyms, they are only intended to allow user agents to support legacy content.

Status

One of the following:

Proposal

The name has not received wide peer review and approval. Someone has proposed it and is using it.

Accepted

The name has received wide peer review and approval. It has a specification that unambiguously defines how to handle pages that use the name, including when they use it in incorrect ways.

Unendorsed

The metadata name has received wide peer review and it has been found wanting. Existing pages are using this keyword, but new pages should avoid it. The "brief description" and "link to more details" entries will give details of what authors should use instead, if anything.

If a metadata name is added with the "proposal" status and found to be redundant with existing values, it should be removed and listed as a synonym for the existing value.

Conformance checkers must use the information given on the WHATWG Wiki MetaExtensions page to establish if a value not explicitly defined in this specification is allowed or not. When an author uses a new type not defined by either this specification or the Wiki page, conformance checkers should offer to add the value to the Wiki, with the details described above, with the "proposal" status.

This specification does not define how new values will get approved. It is expected that the Wiki will have a community that addresses this.

Metadata names whose values are to be URLs must not be proposed or accepted. Links must be represented using the link element, not the meta element.

Pragma directives

When the http-equiv attribute is specified on a meta element, the element is a pragma directive.

The http-equiv attribute is an enumerated attribute. The following table lists the keywords defined for this attribute. The states given in the first cell of the rows with keywords give the states to which those keywords map. Some of the keywords are non-conforming, as noted in the last column.

When a meta element is inserted into the document, if its http-equiv attribute is present and represents one of the above states, then the user agent must run the algorithm appropriate for that state, as described in the following list:

Content language

This non-conforming pragma sets the document-wide default language. Until the pragma is successfully processed, there is no document-wide default language.

1. If another meta element in the Content Language state has already been successfully processed (i.e. when it was inserted the user agent processed it and reached the last step of this list of steps), then abort these steps.

2. If the meta element has no content attribute, or if that attribute's value is the empty string, then abort these steps.

3. Let input be the value of the element's content attribute.

4. Let position point at the first character of input.

5. Skip whitespace.

6. Collect a sequence of characters that are neither space characters nor a U+002C COMMA character (",").

7. Let the document-wide default language be the string that resulted from the previous step.

For meta elements in the Content Language state, the content attribute must have a value consisting of a valid RFC 3066 language code. [RFC3066]

This pragma is not exactly equivalent to the HTTP Content-Language header, for instance it only supports one language. [RFC2616]

Encoding declaration state

The Encoding declaration state's user agent requirements are all handled by the parsing section of the specification. The state is just an alternative form of setting the charset attribute: it is a character encoding declaration.

For meta elements in the Encoding declaration state, the content attribute must have a value that is an ASCII case-insensitive match for a string that consists of: the literal string "text/html;", optionally followed by any number of space characters, followed by the literal string "charset=", followed by the character encoding name of the character encoding declaration.

If the document contains a meta element in the Encoding declaration state, then the document must not contain a meta element with the charset attribute present.

The Encoding declaration state may be used in HTML documents only, elements in that state must not be used in XML documents.

Default style state

1. ...

Refresh state

1. If another meta element in the Refresh state has already been successfully processed (i.e. when it was inserted the user agent processed it and reached the last step of this list of steps), then abort these steps.

2. If the meta element has no content attribute, or if that attribute's value is the empty string, then abort these steps.

3. Let input be the value of the element's content attribute.

4. Let position point at the first character of input.

5. Skip whitespace.

6. Collect a sequence of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE, and parse the resulting string using the rules for parsing non-negative integers. If the sequence of characters collected is the empty string, then no number will have been parsed; abort these steps. Otherwise, let time be the parsed number.

7. Collect a sequence of characters in the range U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE and U+002E FULL STOP ("."). Ignore any collected characters.

8. Skip whitespace.

9. Let url be the address of the current page.

10. If the character in input pointed to by position is a U+003B SEMICOLON (";"), then advance position to the next character. Otherwise, jump to the last step.

11. Skip whitespace.

12. If the character in input pointed to by position is one of U+0055 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U or U+0075 LATIN SMALL LETTER U, then advance position to the next character. Otherwise, jump to the last step.

13. If the character in input pointed to by position is one of U+0052 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R or U+0072 LATIN SMALL LETTER R, then advance position to the next character. Otherwise, jump to the last step.

14. If the character in input pointed to by position is one of U+004C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L or U+006C LATIN SMALL LETTER L, then advance position to the next character. Otherwise, jump to the last step.

15. Skip whitespace.

16. If the character in input pointed to by position is a U+003D EQUALS SIGN ("="), then advance position to the next character. Otherwise, jump to the last step.

17. Skip whitespace.

18. Let url be equal to the substring of input from the character at position to the end of the string.

19. Strip any trailing space characters from the end of url.

20. Strip any U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION, U+000A LINE FEED (LF), and U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) characters from url.

21. Resolve the url value to an absolute URL, relative to the meta element. If this fails, abort these steps.

22. Perform one or more of the following steps:

    • Set a timer so that in time seconds, adjusted to take into account user or user agent preferences, if the user has not canceled the redirect, the user agent navigates the document's browsing context to url, with replacement enabled, and with the document's browsing context as the source browsing context.

    • Provide the user with an interface that, when selected, navigates a browsing context to url, with the document's browsing context as the source browsing context.

    • Do nothing.

    In addition, the user agent may, as with anything, inform the user of any and all aspects of its operation, including the state of any timers, the destinations of any timed redirects, and so forth.

For meta elements in the Refresh state, the content attribute must have a value consisting either of:

• just a valid non-negative integer, or
• a valid non-negative integer, followed by a U+003B SEMICOLON (;), followed by one or more space characters, followed by either a U+0055 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U or a U+0075 LATIN SMALL LETTER U, a U+0052 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R or a U+0072 LATIN SMALL LETTER R, a U+004C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L or a U+006C LATIN SMALL LETTER L, a U+003D EQUALS SIGN (=), and then a valid URL.

In the former case, the integer represents a number of seconds before the page is to be reloaded; in the latter case the integer represents a number of seconds before the page is to be replaced by the page at the given URL.

There must not be more than one meta element with any particular state in the document at a time.

Other pragma directives

Extensions to the predefined set of pragma directives may, under certain conditions, be registered in the WHATWG Wiki PragmaExtensions page.

Such extensions must use a name that is identical to a previously-registered HTTP header defined in an RFC, and must have behavior identical to that described for the HTTP header. Pragma directions corresponding to headers describing metadata, or not requiring specific user agent processing, must not be registered; instead, use metadata names. Pragma directions corresponding to headers that affect the HTTP processing model (e.g. caching) must not be registered, as they would result in HTTP-level behavior being different for user agents that implement HTML than for user agents that do not.

Anyone is free to edit the WHATWG Wiki PragmaExtensions page at any time to add a pragma directive satisfying these conditions. Such registrations must specify the following information:

Keyword

The actual name being defined.

Brief description

A short description of the purpose of the pragma directive.

Specification

A link to an IETF RFC defining the corresponding HTTP header.

Conformance checkers must use the information given on the WHATWG Wiki PragmaExtensions page to establish if a value not explicitly defined in this specification is allowed or not.

Specifying the document's character encoding

A character encoding declaration is a mechanism by which the character encoding used to store or transmit a document is specified.

The following restrictions apply to character encoding declarations:

• The character encoding name given must be the name of the character encoding used to serialize the file.
• The value must be a valid character encoding name, and must be the preferred name for that encoding. [IANACHARSET]
• The character encoding declaration must be serialized without the use of character references or character escapes of any kind.
• The element containing the character encoding declaration must be serialised completely within the first 512 bytes of the document.

If the document does not start with a BOM, and if its encoding is not explicitly given by Content-Type metadata, then the character encoding used must be an ASCII-compatible character encoding, and, in addition, if that encoding isn't US-ASCII itself, then the encoding must be specified using a meta element with a charset attribute or a meta element in the Encoding declaration state.

If the document contains a meta element with a charset attribute or a meta element in the Encoding declaration state, then the character encoding used must be an ASCII-compatible character encoding.

Authors should not use JIS_X0212-1990, x-JIS0208, and encodings based on EBCDIC. Authors should not use UTF-32. Authors must not use the CESU-8, UTF-7, BOCU-1 and SCSU encodings. [CESU8] [UTF7] [BOCU1] [SCSU]

Authors are encouraged to use UTF-8. Conformance checkers may advise against authors using legacy encodings.

In XHTML, the XML declaration should be used for inline character encoding information, if necessary.

The style element

Categories

Metadata content.

If the scoped attribute is present: flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

If the scoped attribute is absent: where metadata content is expected.

If the scoped attribute is absent: in a noscript element that is a child of a head element.

If the scoped attribute is present: where flow content is expected, but before any other flow content other than other style elements and inter-element whitespace.

Content model:

Depends on the value of the type attribute.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

media

type

scoped

Also, the title attribute has special semantics on this element.

DOM interface:

interface HTMLStyleElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute boolean disabled;
           attribute DOMString media;
           attribute DOMString type;
           attribute boolean scoped;
};

The LinkStyle interface must also be implemented by this element, the styling processing model defines how. [CSSOM]

The style element allows authors to embed style information in their documents. The style element is one of several inputs to the styling processing model. The element does not represent content for the user.

If the type attribute is given, it must contain a valid MIME type, optionally with parameters, that designates a styling language. [RFC2046] If the attribute is absent, the type defaults to text/css. [RFC2138]

When examining types to determine if they support the language, user agents must not ignore unknown MIME parameters — types with unknown parameters must be assumed to be unsupported.

The media attribute says which media the styles apply to. The value must be a valid media query. [MQ] User agents must apply the styles to views while their state match the listed media, and must not apply them otherwise.

The styles might be further limited in scope, e.g. in CSS with the use of @media blocks. This specification does not override such further restrictions or requirements.

The default, if the media attribute is omitted, is all, meaning that by default styles apply to all media.

The scoped attribute is a boolean attribute. If the attribute is present, then the user agent must apply the specified style information only to the style element's parent element (if any), and that element's child nodes. Otherwise, the specified styles must, if applied, be applied to the entire document.

The title attribute on style elements defines alternative style sheet sets. If the style element has no title attribute, then it has no title; the title attribute of ancestors does not apply to the style element.

The title attribute on style elements, like the title attribute on link elements, differs from the global title attribute in that a style block without a title does not inherit the title of the parent element: it merely has no title.

All descendant elements must be processed, according to their semantics, before the style element itself is evaluated. For styling languages that consist of pure text, user agents must evaluate style elements by passing the concatenation of the contents of all the text nodes that are direct children of the style element (not any other nodes such as comments or elements), in tree order, to the style system. For XML-based styling languages, user agents must pass all the child nodes of the style element to the style system.

All URLs found by the styling language's processor must be resolved, relative to the element (or as defined by the styling language), when the processor is invoked.

This specification does not specify a style system, but CSS is expected to be supported by most Web browsers. [CSS21]

The media, type and scoped DOM attributes must reflect the respective content attributes of the same name.

The DOM disabled attribute behaves as defined for the alternative style sheets DOM.

Styling

The link and style elements can provide styling information for the user agent to use when rendering the document. The DOM Styling specification specifies what styling information is to be used by the user agent and how it is to be used. [CSSOM]

The style and link elements implement the LinkStyle interface. [CSSOM]

For style elements, if the user agent does not support the specified styling language, then the sheet attribute of the element's LinkStyle interface must return null. Similarly, link elements that do not represent external resource links that contribute to the styling processing model (i.e. that do not have a stylesheet keyword in their rel attribute), and link elements whose specified resource has not yet been fetched, or is not in a supported styling language, must have their LinkStyle interface's sheet attribute return null.

Otherwise, the LinkStyle interface's sheet attribute must return a StyleSheet object with the attributes implemented as follows: [CSSOM]

The content type (type DOM attribute)

The content type must be the same as the style's specified type. For style elements, this is the same as the type content attribute's value, or text/css if that is omitted. For link elements, this is the Content-Type metadata of the specified resource.

The location (href DOM attribute)

For link elements, the location must be the result of resolving the URL given by the element's href content attribute, relative to the element, or the empty string if that fails. For style elements, there is no location.

The intended destination media for style information (media DOM attribute)

The media must be the same as the value of the element's media content attribute.

The style sheet title (title DOM attribute)

The title must be the same as the value of the element's title content attribute. If the attribute is absent, then the style sheet does not have a title. The title is used for defining alternative style sheet sets.

The disabled DOM attribute on link and style elements must return false and do nothing on setting, if the sheet attribute of their LinkStyle interface is null. Otherwise, it must return the value of the StyleSheet interface's disabled attribute on getting, and forward the new value to that same attribute on setting.

Scripting

Scripts allow authors to add interactivity to their documents.

Authors are encouraged to use declarative alternatives to scripting where possible, as declarative mechanisms are often more maintainable, and many users disable scripting.

Authors are also encouraged to make their applications degrade gracefully in the absence of scripting support.

The script element

Categories

Metadata content.

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where metadata content is expected.

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

If there is no src attribute, depends on the value of the type attribute.

If there is a src attribute, the element must be either empty or contain only script documentation.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

src

async

defer

type

charset

DOM interface:

interface HTMLScriptElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute DOMString src;
           attribute boolean async;
           attribute boolean defer;
           attribute DOMString type;
           attribute DOMString charset;
           attribute DOMString text;
};

The script element allows authors to include dynamic script and data blocks in their documents. The element does not represent content for the user.

When used to include dynamic scripts, the scripts may either be embedded inline or may be imported from an external file using the src attribute. If the language is not that described by "text/javascript", then the type attribute must be present. If the type attribute is present, its value must be the type of the script's language.

When used to include data blocks, the data must be embedded inline, the format of the data must be given using the type attribute, and the src attribute must not be specified.

The type attribute gives the language of the script or format of the data. If the attribute is present, its value must be a valid MIME type, optionally with parameters. The charset parameter must not be specified. (The default, which is used if the attribute is absent, is "text/javascript".) [RFC2046]

The src attribute, if specified, gives the address of the external script resource to use. The value of the attribute must be a valid URL identifying a script resource of the type given by the type attribute, if the attribute is present, or of the type "text/javascript", if the attribute is absent.

The charset attribute gives the character encoding of the external script resource. The attribute must not be specified if the src attribute is not present. If the attribute is set, its value must be a valid character encoding name, must be the preferred name for that encoding, and must match the encoding given in the charset parameter of the Content-Type metadata of the external file, if any. [IANACHARSET]

The async and defer attributes are boolean attributes that indicate how the script should be executed.

There are three possible modes that can be selected using these attributes. If the async attribute is present, then the script will be executed asynchronously, as soon as it is available. If the async attribute is not present but the defer attribute is present, then the script is executed when the page has finished parsing. If neither attribute is present, then the script is fetched and executed immediately, before the user agent continues parsing the page. The exact processing details for these attributes is described below.

The defer attribute may be specified even if the async attribute is specified, to cause legacy Web browsers that only support defer (and not async) to fall back to the defer behavior instead of the synchronous blocking behavior that is the default.

Changing the src, type, charset, async, and defer attributes dynamically has no direct effect; these attribute are only used at specific times described below (namely, when the element is inserted into the document).

script elements have four associated pieces of metadata. The first is a flag indicating whether or not the script block has been "already executed". Initially, script elements must have this flag unset (script blocks, when created, are not "already executed"). When a script element is cloned, the "already executed" flag, if set, must be propagated to the clone when it is created. The second is a flag indicating whether the element was "parser-inserted". This flag is set by the HTML parser and is used to handle document.write() calls. The third and fourth pieces of metadata are the script block's type and the script block's character encoding. They are determined when the script is run, based on the attributes on the element at that time.

When a script element that is neither marked as having "already executed" nor marked as being "parser-inserted" experiences one of the events listed in the following list, the user agent must run the script element:

• The script element gets inserted into a document.
• The script element's child nodes are changed.
• The script element has a src attribute set where previously the elment had no such attribute.

Running a script: When a script element is to be run, the user agent must act as follows:

1. If either:

   • the script element has a type attribute and its value is the empty string, or
   • the script element has no type attribute but it has a language attribute and that attribute's value is the empty string, or
   • the script element has neither a type attribute nor a language attribute, then

   ...let the script block's type for this script element be "text/javascript".

   Otherwise, if the script element has a type attribute, let the script block's type for this script element be the value of that attribute.

   Otherwise, the element has a non-empty language attribute; let the script block's type for this script element be the concatenation of the string "text/" followed by the value of the language attribute.

   The language attribute is never conforming, and is always ignored if there is a type attribute present.

2. If the script element has a charset attribute, then let the script block's character encoding for this script element be the encoding given by the charset attribute.

   Otherwise, let the script block's character encoding for this script element be the same as the encoding of the document itself.

3. If scripting is disabled for the script element, or if the user agent does not support the scripting language given by the script block's type for this script element, then the user agent must abort these steps at this point. The script is not executed.

4. If the element has no src attribute, and its child nodes consist only of comment nodes and empty text nodes, then the user agent must abort these steps at this point. The script is not executed.

5. The user agent must set the element's "already executed" flag.

6. If the element has a src attribute, then the value of that attribute must be resolved relative to the element, and if that is successful, the specified resource must then be fetched.

   For historical reasons, if the URL is a javascript: URL, then the user agent must not, despite the requirements in the definition of the fetching algorithm, actually execute the given script; instead the user agent must act as if it had received an empty HTTP 400 response.

   Once the resource's Content Type metadata is available, if it ever is, apply the algorithm for extracting an encoding from a Content-Type to it. If this returns an encoding, and the user agent supports that encoding, then let the script block's character encoding be that encoding.

   Once the fetching process has completed, and the script has completed loading, the user agent will have to complete the steps described below. (If the parser is still active at that time, those steps defer to the parser to handle the execution of pending scripts.)

   For performance reasons, user agents may start fetching the script as soon as the attribute is set, instead, in the hope that the element will be inserted into the document. Either way, once the element is inserted into the document, the load must have started. If the UA performs such prefetching, but the element is never inserted in the document, or the src attribute is dynamically changed, then the user agent will not execute the script, and the fetching process will have been effectively wasted.

7. Then, the first of the following options that describes the situation must be followed:

   If the document is still being parsed, and the element has a defer attribute, and the element does not have an async attribute

   The element must be added to the end of the list of scripts that will execute when the document has finished parsing.

   This isn't compatible with IE for inline deferred scripts, but then what IE does is pretty hard to pin down exactly. Do we want to keep this like it is? Be more compatible?

   If the element has an async attribute and a src attribute

   The element must be added to the end of the list of scripts that will execute asynchronously.

   If the element has an async attribute but no src attribute, and the list of scripts that will execute asynchronously is not empty

   The element must be added to the end of the list of scripts that will execute asynchronously.

   If the element has a src attribute and has been flagged as "parser-inserted"

   The element is the pending external script. (There can only be one such script at a time.)

   If the element has a src attribute

   The element must be added to the end of the list of scripts that will execute as soon as possible.

   Otherwise

   The user agent must immediately execute the script block, even if other scripts are already executing.

When a script completes loading: If the script element was added to one of the lists mentioned above and the document is still being parsed, then the parser handles it. Otherwise, the UA must run the following steps as the task that the networking task source places on the task queue:

If the script element was added to the list of scripts that will execute when the document has finished parsing:

1. If the script element is not the first element in the list, then do nothing yet. Stop going through these steps.

2. Otherwise, execute the script block (the first element in the list).

3. Remove the script element from the list (i.e. shift out the first entry in the list).

4. If there are any more entries in the list, and if the script associated with the element that is now the first in the list is already loaded, then jump back to step two to execute it.

If the script element was added to the list of scripts that will execute asynchronously:

1. If the script is not the first element in the list, then do nothing yet. Stop going through these steps.

2. Execute the script block (the first element in the list).

3. Remove the script element from the list (i.e. shift out the first entry in the list).

4. If there are any more scripts in the list, and the element now at the head of the list had no src attribute when it was added to the list, or had one, but its associated script has finished loading, then jump back to step two to execute the script associated with this element.

If the script element was added to the list of scripts that will execute as soon as possible:

1. Execute the script block.

2. Remove the script element from the list.

Fetching an external script must delay the load event.

Executing a script block: When the steps above require that the script block be executed, the user agent must act as follows:

If the load resulted in an error (for example a DNS error, or an HTTP 404 error)

Executing the script block must just consist of firing an error event at the element.

If the load was successful

1. Initialize the script block's source as follows:

   If the script is from an external file

   The contents of that file, interpreted as string of Unicode characters, are the script source.

   For each of the rows in the following table, starting with the first one and going down, if the file has as many or more bytes available than the number of bytes in the first column, and the first bytes of the file match the bytes given in the first column, then set the script block's character encoding to the encoding given in the cell in the second column of that row, irrespective of any previous value:

   Bytes in Hexadecimal	Encoding
   FE FF	UTF-16BE
   FF FE	UTF-16LE
   EF BB BF	UTF-8

   This step looks for Unicode Byte Order Marks (BOMs).

   The file must then be converted to Unicode using the character encoding given by the script block's character encoding.

   If the script is inline and the script block's type is a text-based language

   The value of the DOM text attribute at the time the "running a script" algorithm was first invoked is the script source.

   If the script is inline and the script block's type is an XML-based language

   The child nodes of the script element at the time the "running a script" algorithm was first invoked are the script source.

2. Create a script from the script element node, using the the script block's source and the the script block's type.

   This is where the script is compiled and actually executed.

3. Fire a load event at the script element.

The DOM attributes src, type, charset, async, and defer, each must reflect the respective content attributes of the same name.

The DOM attribute text must return a concatenation of the contents of all the text nodes that are direct children of the script element (ignoring any other nodes such as comments or elements), in tree order. On setting, it must act the same way as the textContent DOM attribute.

<script src="game-engine.js"></script>
<script type="text/x-game-map">
........U.........e
o............A....e
.....A.....AAA....e
.A..AAA...AAAAA...e
</script>

When inserted using the document.write() method, script elements execute (typically synchronously), but when inserted using innerHTML and outerHTML attributes, they do not execute at all.

Scripting languages

A user agent is said to support the scripting language if the script block's type matches the MIME type of a scripting language that the user agent implements.

The following lists some MIME types and the languages to which they refer:

text/javascript

text/javascript1.1

text/javascript1.2

text/javascript1.3

ECMAScript. [ECMA262]

text/javascript;e4x=1

ECMAScript with ECMAScript for XML. [ECMA357]

User agents may support other MIME types and other languages.

When examining types to determine if they support the language, user agents must not ignore unknown MIME parameters — types with unknown parameters must be assumed to be unsupported.

Inline documentation for external scripts

If a script element's src attribute is specified, then the contents of the script element, if any, must be such that the value of the DOM text attribute, which is derived from the element's contents, matches the documentation production in the following ABNF, the character set for which is Unicode. [ABNF]

documentation = *( *( space / tab / comment ) [ line-comment ] newline )
comment       = slash star *( not-star / star not-slash ) 1*star slash
line-comment  = slash slash *not-newline

; characters
tab           = %x0009 ; U+0009 TAB
newline       = %x000A ; U+000A LINE FEED
space         = %x0020 ; U+0020 SPACE
star          = %x002A ; U+002A ASTERISK
slash         = %x002F ; U+002F SOLIDUS
not-newline   = %x0000-0009 / %x000B-%10FFFF
                ; a Unicode character other than U+000A LINE FEED
not-star      = %x0000-0029 / %x002B-%10FFFF
                ; a Unicode character other than U+002A ASTERISK
not-slash     = %x0000-002E / %x0030-%10FFFF
                ; a Unicode character other than U+002F SOLIDUS

<script src="cool-effects.js">
 // create new instances using:
 //    var e = new Effect();
 // start the effect using .play, stop using .stop:
 //    e.play();
 //    e.stop();
</script>

The noscript element

Categories

Metadata content.

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

In a head element of an HTML document, if there are no ancestor noscript elements.

Where phrasing content is expected in HTML documents, if there are no ancestor noscript elements.

Content model:

When scripting is disabled, in a head element: in any order, zero or more link elements, zero or more style elements, and zero or more meta elements.

When scripting is disabled, not in a head element: transparent, but there must be no noscript element descendants.

Otherwise: text that conforms to the requirements given in the prose.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The noscript element represents nothing if scripting is enabled, and represents its children if scripting is disabled. It is used to present different markup to user agents that support scripting and those that don't support scripting, by affecting how the document is parsed.

When used in HTML documents, the allowed content model is as follows:

In a head element, if scripting is disabled for the noscript element

The noscript element must contain only link, style, and meta elements.

In a head element, if scripting is enabled for the noscript element

The noscript element must contain only text, except that invoking the HTML fragment parsing algorithm with the noscript element as the context element and the text contents as the input must result in a list of nodes that consists only of link, style, and meta elements, and no parse errors.

Outside of head elements, if scripting is disabled for the noscript element

The noscript element's content model is transparent, with the additional restriction that a noscript element must not have a noscript element as an ancestor (that is, noscript can't be nested).

Outside of head elements, if scripting is enabled for the noscript element

The noscript element must contain only text, except that the text must be such that running the following algorithm results in a conforming document with no noscript elements and no script elements, and such that no step in the algorithm causes an HTML parser to flag a parse error:

1. Remove every script element from the document.
2. Make a list of every noscript element in the document. For every noscript element in that list, perform the following steps:
   1. Let the parent element be the parent element of the noscript element.
   2. Take all the children of the parent element that come before the noscript element, and call these elements the before children.
   3. Take all the children of the parent element that come after the noscript element, and call these elements the after children.
   4. Let s be the concatenation of all the text node children of the noscript element.
   5. Set the innerHTML attribute of the parent element to the value of s. (This, as a side-effect, causes the noscript element to be removed from the document.)
   6. Insert the before children at the start of the parent element, preserving their original relative order.
   7. Insert the after children at the end of the parent element, preserving their original relative order.

All these contortions are required because, for historical reasons, the noscript element is handled differently by the HTML parser based on whether scripting was enabled or not when the parser was invoked. The element is not allowed in XML, because in XML the parser is not affected by such state, and thus the element would not have the desired effect.

The noscript element must not be used in XML documents.

The noscript element is only effective in the HTML serialization, it has no effect in the XML serialization.

The noscript element has no other requirements. In particular, children of the noscript element are not exempt from form submission, scripting, and so forth, even when scripting is enabled for the element.

Sections

Some elements, for example address elements, are scoped to their nearest ancestor sectioning content. For such elements x, the elements that apply to a sectioning content element e are all the x elements whose nearest sectioning content ancestor is e.

The body element

Categories

Sectioning root.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

As the second element in an html element.

Content model:

Flow content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

onbeforeunload

onerror

onhashchange

onload

onmessage

onoffline

ononline

onpopstate

onresize

onstorage

onunload

DOM interface:

interface HTMLBodyElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute Function onbeforeunload;
           attribute Function onerror;
           attribute Function onhashchange;
           attribute Function onload;
           attribute Function onmessage;
           attribute Function onoffline;
           attribute Function ononline;
           attribute Function onpopstate;
           attribute Function onresize;
           attribute Function onstorage;
           attribute Function onunload;
};

The body element represents the main content of the document.

In conforming documents, there is only one body element. The document.body DOM attribute provides scripts with easy access to a document's body element.

Some DOM operations (for example, parts of the drag and drop model) are defined in terms of "the body element". This refers to a particular element in the DOM, as per the definition of the term, and not any arbitrary body element.

The body element exposes as event handler content attributes a number of the event handler attributes of the Window object. It also mirrors their event handler DOM attributes.

The onerror and onmessage event handler attributes of the Window object, exposed on the body element, shadow the generic onerror and onmessage event handler attributes normally supported by HTML elements.

Thus, for example, a bubbling message event fired on a child of the body element of a Document would first trigger the onmessage event handler content attributes of that element, then that of the root html element, and only then would it trigger the onmessage event handler content attribute on the body element. This is because the event would bubble from the target, to the body, to the html, to the Document, to the Window, and the event handler attribute on the body is watching the Window not the body. A regular event listener attached to the body using addEventListener(), however, would fire when the event bubbled through the body and not when it reaches the Window object.

The h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 elements

Categories

Flow content.

Heading content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

These elements define headers for their sections.

The semantics and meaning of these elements are defined in the section on headings and sections.

These elements have a rank given by the number in their name. The h1 element is said to have the highest rank, the h6 element has the lowest rank, and two elements with the same name have equal rank.

The address element

Categories

Flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Flow content, but with no heading content descendants, no sectioning content descendants, no footer element descendants, and no address element descendants.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The address element represents the contact information for the section it applies to. If it applies to the body element, then it instead applies to the document as a whole.

<ADDRESS>
 <A href="../People/Raggett/">Dave Raggett</A>, 
 <A href="../People/Arnaud/">Arnaud Le Hors</A>, 
 contact persons for the <A href="Activity">W3C HTML Activity</A>
</ADDRESS>

The address element must not be used to represent arbitrary addresses (e.g. postal addresses), unless those addresses are contact information for the section. (The p element is the appropriate element for marking up such addresses.)

The address element must not contain information other than contact information.

<ADDRESS>Last Modified: 1999/12/24 23:37:50</ADDRESS>

Typically, the address element would be included with other information in a footer element.

To determine the contact information for a sectioning content element (such as a document's body element, which would give the contact information for the page), UAs must collect all the address elements that apply to that sectioning content element and its ancestor sectioning content elements. The contact information is the collection of all the information given by those elements.

Contact information for one sectioning content element, e.g. an aside element, does not apply to its ancestor elements, e.g. the page's body.

Grouping content

The p element

Categories

Flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The p element represents a paragraph.

<p>The little kitten gently seated himself on a piece of
carpet. Later in his life, this would be referred to as the time the
cat sat on the mat.</p>

<fieldset>
 <legend>Personal information</legend>
 <p>
   <label>Name: <input name="n"></label>
   <label><input name="anon" type="checkbox"> Hide from other users</label>
 </p>
 <p><label>Address: <textarea name="a"></textarea></label></p>
</fieldset>

<p>There was once an example from Femley,<br>
Whose markup was of dubious quality.<br>
The validator complained,<br>
So the author was pained,<br>
To move the error from the markup to the rhyming.</p>

The p element should not be used when a more specific element is more appropriate.

<section>
 <!-- ... -->
 <p>Last modified: 2001-04-23</p>
 <p>Author: fred@example.com</p>
</section>

<section>
 <!-- ... -->
 <footer>Last modified: 2001-04-23</footer>
 <address>Author: fred@example.com</address>
</section>

<section>
 <!-- ... -->
 <footer>
  <p>Last modified: 2001-04-23</p>
  <address>Author: fred@example.com</address>
 </footer>
</section>

The hr element

Categories

Flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Empty.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The hr element represents a paragraph-level thematic break, e.g. a scene change in a story, or a transition to another topic within a section of a reference book.

The br element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Empty.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The br element represents a line break.

br elements must be empty. Any content inside br elements must not be considered part of the surrounding text.

br elements must be used only for line breaks that are actually part of the content, as in poems or addresses.

<p>P. Sherman<br>
42 Wallaby Way<br>
Sydney</p>

br elements must not be used for separating thematic groups in a paragraph.

<p><a ...>34 comments.</a><br>
<a ...>Add a comment.<a></p>

<p>Name: <input name="name"><br>
Address: <input name="address"></p>

<p><a ...>34 comments.</a></p>
<p><a ...>Add a comment.<a></p>

<p>Name: <input name="name"></p>
<p>Address: <input name="address"></p>

If a paragraph consists of nothing but a single br element, it represents a placeholder blank line (e.g. as in a template). Such blank lines must not be used for presentation purposes.

The pre element

Categories

Flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The pre element represents a block of preformatted text, in which structure is represented by typographic conventions rather than by elements.

In the HTML serialization, a leading newline character immediately following the pre element start tag is stripped.

Some examples of cases where the pre element could be used:

• Including an e-mail, with paragraphs indicated by blank lines, lists indicated by lines prefixed with a bullet, and so on.
• Including fragments of computer code, with structure indicated according to the conventions of that language.
• Displaying ASCII art.

To represent a block of computer code, the pre element can be used with a code element; to represent a block of computer output the pre element can be used with a samp element. Similarly, the kbd element can be used within a pre element to indicate text that the user is to enter.

<p>This is the <code>Panel</code> constructor:</p>
<pre><code>function Panel(element, canClose, closeHandler) {
  this.element = element;
  this.canClose = canClose;
  this.closeHandler = function () { if (closeHandler) closeHandler() };
}</code></pre>

<pre><samp>You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded
front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

></samp> <kbd>open mailbox</kbd>

<samp>Opening the mailbox reveals:
A leaflet.

></samp></pre>

<pre>                maxling

it is with a          heart
               heavy

that i admit loss of a feline
        so           loved

a friend lost to the
        unknown
                                (night)

~cdr 11dec07</pre>

The blockquote element

Categories

Flow content.

Sectioning root.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Flow content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

cite

DOM interface:

interface HTMLQuoteElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute DOMString cite;
};

The HTMLQuoteElement interface is also used by the q element.

The blockquote element represents a section that is quoted from another source.

Content inside a blockquote must be quoted from another source, whose address, if it has one, should be cited in the cite attribute.

If the cite attribute is present, it must be a valid URL. To obtain the corresponding citation link, the value of the attribute must be resolved relative to the element. User agents should allow users to follow such citation links.

The cite DOM attribute must reflect the element's cite content attribute.

The best way to represent a conversation is not with the cite and blockquote elements, but with the dialog element.

<p>His next piece was the aptly named <cite>Sonnet 130</cite>:</p>
<blockquote cite="http://quotes.example.org/s/sonnet130.html">
  <p>My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,<br>
  Coral is far more red, than her lips red,<br>
  ...

The ol element

Categories

Flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Zero or more li elements.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

reversed

start

DOM interface:

interface HTMLOListElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute boolean reversed;
           attribute long start;
};

The ol element represents a list of items, where the items have been intentionally ordered, such that changing the order would change the meaning of the document.

The items of the list are the li element child nodes of the ol element, in tree order.

The reversed attribute is a boolean attribute. If present, it indicates that the list is a descending list (..., 3, 2, 1). If the attribute is omitted, the list is an ascending list (1, 2, 3, ...).

The start attribute, if present, must be a valid integer giving the ordinal value of the first list item.

If the start attribute is present, user agents must parse it as an integer, in order to determine the attribute's value. The default value, used if the attribute is missing or if the value cannot be converted to a number according to the referenced algorithm, is 1 if the element has no reversed attribute, and is the number of child li elements otherwise.

The first item in the list has the ordinal value given by the ol element's start attribute, unless that li element has a value attribute with a value that can be successfully parsed, in which case it has the ordinal value given by that value attribute.

Each subsequent item in the list has the ordinal value given by its value attribute, if it has one, or, if it doesn't, the ordinal value of the previous item, plus one if the reversed is absent, or minus one if it is present.

The reversed DOM attribute must reflect the value of the reversed content attribute.

The start DOM attribute must reflect the value of the start content attribute.

<p>I have lived in the following countries (given in the order of when
I first lived there):</p>
<ol>
 <li>Switzerland
 <li>United Kingdom
 <li>United States
 <li>Norway
</ol>

<p>I have lived in the following countries (given in the order of when
I first lived there):</p>
<ol>
 <li>United Kingdom
 <li>Switzerland
 <li>United States
 <li>Norway
</ol>

The ul element

Categories

Flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Zero or more li elements.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The ul element represents a list of items, where the order of the items is not important — that is, where changing the order would not materially change the meaning of the document.

The items of the list are the li element child nodes of the ul element.

<p>I have lived in the following countries:</p>
<ul>
 <li>Norway
 <li>Switzerland
 <li>United Kingdom
 <li>United States
</ul>

<p>I have lived in the following countries:</p>
<ul>
 <li>Switzerland
 <li>Norway
 <li>United Kingdom
 <li>United States
</ul>

The li element

Categories

None.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Inside ol elements.

Inside ul elements.

Inside menu elements.

Content model:

Flow content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

If the element is a child of an ol element: value

DOM interface:

interface HTMLLIElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute long value;
};

The li element represents a list item. If its parent element is an ol, ul, or menu element, then the element is an item of the parent element's list, as defined for those elements. Otherwise, the list item has no defined list-related relationship to any other li element.

The value attribute, if present, must be a valid integer giving the ordinal value of the list item.

If the value attribute is present, user agents must parse it as an integer, in order to determine the attribute's value. If the attribute's value cannot be converted to a number, the attribute must be treated as if it was absent. The attribute has no default value.

The value attribute is processed relative to the element's parent ol element (q.v.), if there is one. If there is not, the attribute has no effect.

The value DOM attribute must reflect the value of the value content attribute.

<figure>
 <legend>The top 10 movies of all time</legend>
 <ol>
  <li value="10"><cite>Josie and the Pussycats</cite>, 2001</li>
  <li value="9"><cite lang="sh">Црна мачка, бели мачор</cite>, 1998</li>
  <li value="8"><cite>A Bug's Life</cite>, 1998</li>
  <li value="7"><cite>Toy Story</cite>, 1995</li>
  <li value="6"><cite>Monsters, Inc</cite>, 2001</li>
  <li value="5"><cite>Cars</cite>, 2006</li>
  <li value="4"><cite>Toy Story 2</cite>, 1999</li>
  <li value="3"><cite>Finding Nemo</cite>, 2003</li>
  <li value="2"><cite>The Incredibles</cite>, 2004</li>
  <li value="1"><cite>Ratatouille</cite>, 2007</li>
 </ol>
</figure>

<figure>
 <legend>The top 10 movies of all time</legend>
 <ol reversed>
  <li><cite>Josie and the Pussycats</cite>, 2001</li>
  <li><cite lang="sh">Црна мачка, бели мачор</cite>, 1998</li>
  <li><cite>A Bug's Life</cite>, 1998</li>
  <li><cite>Toy Story</cite>, 1995</li>
  <li><cite>Monsters, Inc</cite>, 2001</li>
  <li><cite>Cars</cite>, 2006</li>
  <li><cite>Toy Story 2</cite>, 1999</li>
  <li><cite>Finding Nemo</cite>, 2003</li>
  <li><cite>The Incredibles</cite>, 2004</li>
  <li><cite>Ratatouille</cite>, 2007</li>
 </ol>
</figure>

If the li element is the child of a menu element and itself has a child that defines a command, then the li element will match the :enabled and :disabled pseudo-classes in the same way as the first such child element does.

The dl element

Categories

Flow content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where flow content is expected.

Content model:

Zero or more groups each consisting of one or more dt elements followed by one or more dd elements.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The dl element represents an association list consisting of zero or more name-value groups (a description list). Each group must consist of one or more names (dt elements) followed by one or more values (dd elements).

Name-value groups may be terms and definitions, metadata topics and values, or any other groups of name-value data.

The values within a group are alternatives; multiple paragraphs forming part of the same value must all be given within the same dd element.

The order of the list of groups, and of the names and values within each group, may be significant.

If a dl element is empty, it contains no groups.

If a dl element contains non-whitespace text nodes, or elements other than dt and dd, then those elements or text nodes do not form part of any groups in that dl.

If a dl element contains only dt elements, then it consists of one group with names but no values.

If a dl element contains only dd elements, then it consists of one group with values but no names.

If a dl element starts with one or more dd elements, then the first group has no associated name.

If a dl element ends with one or more dt elements, then the last group has no associated value.

When a dl element doesn't match its content model, it is often due to accidentally using dd elements in the place of dt elements and vice versa. Conformance checkers can spot such mistakes and might be able to advise authors how to correctly use the markup.

<dl>
 <dt> Authors
 <dd> John
 <dd> Luke
 <dt> Editor
 <dd> Frank
</dl>

<dl>
 <dt lang="en-US"> <dfn>color</dfn> </dt>
 <dt lang="en-GB"> <dfn>colour</dfn> </dt>
 <dd> A sensation which (in humans) derives from the ability of
 the fine structure of the eye to distinguish three differently
 filtered analyses of a view. </dd>
</dl>

<dl>
 <dt> Last modified time </dt>
 <dd> 2004-12-23T23:33Z </dd>
 <dt> Recommended update interval </dt>
 <dd> 60s </dd>
 <dt> Authors </dt>
 <dt> Editors </dt>
 <dd> Robert Rothman </dd>
 <dd> Daniel Jackson </dd>
</dl>

<p>Determine the victory points as follows (use the
first matching case):</p>
<dl>
 <dt> If you have exactly five gold coins </dt>
 <dd> You get five victory points </dd>
 <dt> If you have one or more gold coins, and you have one or more silver coins </dt>
 <dd> You get two victory points </dd>
 <dt> If you have one or more silver coins </dt>
 <dd> You get one victory point </dd>
 <dt> Otherwise </dt>
 <dd> You get no victory points </dd>
</dl>

<dl>
 <dt><dfn>Apartment</dfn>, n.</dt>
 <dd>An execution context grouping one or more threads with one or
 more COM objects.</dd>
 <dt><dfn>Flat</dfn>, n.</dt>
 <dd>A deflated tire.</dd>
 <dt><dfn>Home</dfn>, n.</dt>
 <dd>The user's login directory.</dd>
</dl>

The dl element is inappropriate for marking up dialogue, since dialogue is ordered (each speaker/line pair comes after the next). For an example of how to mark up dialogue, see the dialog element.

The dt element

Categories

None.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Before dd or dt elements inside dl elements.

Before a dd element inside a dialog element.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The dt element represents the term, or name, part of a term-description group in a description list (dl element), and the talker, or speaker, part of a talker-discourse pair in a conversation (dialog element).

The dt element itself, when used in a dl element, does not indicate that its contents are a term being defined, but this can be indicated using the dfn element.

If the dt element is the child of a dialog element, and it further contains a time element, then that time element represents a timestamp for when the associated discourse (dd element) was said, and is not part of the name of the talker.

<dialog>
 <dt> <time>14:22</time> egof
 <dd> I'm not that nerdy, I've only seen 30% of the star trek episodes
 <dt> <time>14:23</time> kaj
 <dd> if you know what percentage of the star trek episodes you have seen, you are inarguably nerdy
 <dt> <time>14:23</time> egof
 <dd> it's unarguably
 <dt> <time>14:24</time> kaj
 <dd> you are not helping your case
</dialog>

The dd element

Categories

None.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

After dt or dd elements inside dl elements.

After a dt element inside a dialog element.

Content model:

Flow content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The dd element represents the description, definition, or value, part of a term-description group in a description list (dl element), and the discourse, or quote, part in a conversation (dialog element).

<dl>
 <dt><dfn>happiness</dfn></dt>
 <dd class="pronunciation">/'hæ p. nes/</dd>
 <dd class="part-of-speech"><i><abbr>n.</abbr></i></dd>
 <dd>The state of being happy.</dd>
 <dd>Good fortune; success. <q>Oh <b>happiness</b>! It worked!</q></dd>
 <dt><dfn>rejoice</dfn></dt>
 <dd class="pronunciation">/ri jois'/</dd>
 <dd><i class="part-of-speech"><abbr>v.intr.</abbr></i> To be delighted oneself.</dd>
 <dd><i class="part-of-speech"><abbr>v.tr.</abbr></i> To cause one to be delighted.</dd>
</dl>

Text-level semantics

The a element

Categories

Interactive content.

Flow content.

When the element only contains phrasing content: phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Transparent, but there must be no interactive content descendant.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

href

target

ping

rel

media

hreflang

type

DOM interface:

[Stringifies=href] interface HTMLAnchorElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute DOMString href;
           attribute DOMString target;
           attribute DOMString ping;
           attribute DOMString rel;
           attribute DOMString media;
           attribute DOMString hreflang;
           attribute DOMString type;
};

The Command interface must also be implemented by this element.

If the a element has an href attribute, then it represents a hyperlink (a hypertext anchor).

If the a element has no href attribute, then the element represents a placeholder for where a link might otherwise have been placed, if it had been relevant.

The target, ping, rel, media, hreflang, and type attributes must be omitted if the href attribute is not present.

<nav>
 <ul>
  <li> <a href="/">Home</a> </li>
  <li> <a href="/news">News</a> </li>
  <li> <a>Examples</a> </li>
  <li> <a href="/legal">Legal</a> </li>
 </ul>
</nav>

Interactive user agents should allow users to follow hyperlinks created using the a element. The href, target and ping attributes decide how the link is followed. The rel, media, hreflang, and type attributes may be used to indicate to the user the likely nature of the target resource before the user follows the link.

The activation behavior of a elements that represent hyperlinks is to run the following steps:

1. If the DOMActivate event in question is not trusted (i.e. a click() method call was the reason for the event being dispatched), and the a element's target attribute is ... then raise an INVALID_ACCESS_ERR exception and abort these steps.

2. If the target of the click event is an img element with an ismap attribute specified, then server-side image map processing must be performed, as follows:

   1. If the DOMActivate event was dispatched as the result of a real pointing-device-triggered click event on the img element, then let x be the distance in CSS pixels from the left edge of the image's left border, if it has one, or the left edge of the image otherwise, to the location of the click, and let y be the distance in CSS pixels from the top edge of the image's top border, if it has one, or the top edge of the image otherwise, to the location of the click. Otherwise, let x and y be zero.
   2. Let the hyperlink suffix be a U+003F QUESTION MARK character, the value of x expressed as a base-ten integer using ASCII digits (U+0030 DIGIT ZERO to U+0039 DIGIT NINE), a U+002C COMMA character, and the value of y expressed as a base-ten integer using ASCII digits.

3. Finally, the user agent must follow the hyperlink defined by the a element. If the steps above defined a hyperlink suffix, then take that into account when following the hyperlink.

The DOM attributes href, ping, target, rel, media, hreflang, and type, must reflect the respective content attributes of the same name.

<aside class="advertising">
 <h1>Advertising</h1>
 <a href="http://ad.example.com/?adid=1929&amp;pubid=1422">
  <section>
   <h1>Mellblomatic 9000!</h1>
   <p>Turn all your widgets into mellbloms!</p>
   <p>Only $9.99 plus shipping and handling.</p>
  </section>
 </a>
 <a href="http://ad.example.com/?adid=375&amp;pubid=1422">
  <section>
   <h1>The Mellblom Browser</h1>
   <p>Web browsing at the speed of light.</p>
   <p>No other browser goes faster!</p>
  </section>
 </a>
</aside>

The q element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

cite

DOM interface:

The q element uses the HTMLQuoteElement interface.

The q element represents some phrasing content quoted from another source.

Quotation punctuation (such as quotation marks) must not appear immediately before, after, or inside q elements; they will be inserted into the rendering by the user agent.

Content inside a q element must be quoted from another source, whose address, if it has one, should be cited in the cite attribute. The source may be fictional, as when quoting characters in a novel or screenplay.

If the cite attribute is present, it must be a valid URL. To obtain the corresponding citation link, the value of the attribute must be resolved relative to the element. User agents should allow users to follow such citation links.

The q element must not be used in place of quotation marks that do not represent quotes; for example, it is inappropriate to use the q element for marking up sarcastic statements.

The use of q elements to mark up quotations is entirely optional; using explicit quotation punctuation without q elements is just as correct.

<p>The man said <q>Things that are impossible just take
longer</q>. I disagreed with him.</p>

<p>The W3C page <cite>About W3C</cite> says the W3C's
mission is <q cite="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/">To lead the
World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and
guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web</q>. I
disagree with this mission.</p>

<p>In <cite>Example One</cite>, he writes <q>The man
said <q>Things that are impossible just take longer</q>. I
disagreed with him</q>. Well, I disagree even more!</p>

<p>His best argument was ❝I disagree❞, which
I thought was laughable.</p>

<p>The word "ineffable" could have been used to describe the disaster
resulting from the campaign's mismanagement.</p>

The cite element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The cite element represents the title of a work (e.g. a book, a paper, an essay, a poem, a score, a song, a script, a film, a TV show, a game, a sculpture, a painting, a theatre production, a play, an opera, a musical, an exhibition, etc). This can be a work that is being quoted or referenced in detail (i.e. a citation), or it can just be a work that is mentioned in passing.

A person's name is not the title of a work — even if people call that person a piece of work — and the element must therefore not be used to mark up people's names. (In some cases, the b element might be appropriate for names; e.g. in a gossip article where the names of famous people are keywords rendered with a different style to draw attention to them. In other cases, if an element is really needed, the span element can be used.)

A ship is similarly not a work, and the element must not be used to mark up ship names (the i element can be used for that purpose).

<p>My favourite book is <cite>The Reality Dysfunction</cite> by
Peter F. Hamilton. My favourite comic is <cite>Pearls Before
Swine</cite> by Stephan Pastis. My favourite track is <cite>Jive
Samba</cite> by the Cannonball Adderley Sextet.</p>

<p>According to the Wikipedia article <cite>HTML</cite>, as it
stood in mid-February 2008, leaving attribute values unquoted is
unsafe. This is obviously an over-simplification.</p>

<!-- do not copy this example, it is an example of bad usage! -->
<p>According to <cite>the Wikipedia article on HTML</cite>, as it
stood in mid-February 2008, leaving attribute values unquoted is
unsafe. This is obviously an over-simplification.</p>

<p><cite>Universal Declaration of Human Rights</cite>, United Nations,
December 1948.  Adopted by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III).</p>

A citation is not a quote (for which the q element is appropriate).

<p><cite>This is wrong!</cite>, said Ian.</p>

<p><q>This is still wrong!</q>, said <cite>Ian</cite>.</p>

<p><q>This is correct</q>, said Ian.</p>

<p>And then <b>Ian</b> said <q>this might be right, in a
gossip column, maybe!</q>.</p>

The em element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The em element represents stress emphasis of its contents.

The level of emphasis that a particular piece of content has is given by its number of ancestor em elements.

The placement of emphasis changes the meaning of the sentence. The element thus forms an integral part of the content. The precise way in which emphasis is used in this way depends on the language.

<p>Cats are cute animals.</p>

<p><em>Cats</em> are cute animals.</p>

<p>Cats <em>are</em> cute animals.</p>

<p>Cats are <em>cute</em> animals.</p>

<p>Cats are cute <em>animals</em>.</p>

<p><em>Cats are cute animals!</em></p>

<p><em>Cats are <em>cute</em> animals!</em></p>

The strong element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The strong element represents strong importance for its contents.

The relative level of importance of a piece of content is given by its number of ancestor strong elements; each strong element increases the importance of its contents.

Changing the importance of a piece of text with the strong element does not change the meaning of the sentence.

<p><strong>Warning.</strong> This dungeon is dangerous.
<strong>Avoid the ducks.</strong> Take any gold you find.
<strong><strong>Do not take any of the diamonds</strong>,
they are explosive and <strong>will destroy anything within
ten meters.</strong></strong> You have been warned.</p>

The small element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The small element represents small print (part of a document often describing disclaimers, caveats, or legal restrictions, such as copyrights or other disadvantages), or other side comments.

The small element does not "de-emphasize" or lower the importance of text emphasised by the em element or marked as important with the strong element.

<footer>
 <address>
  For more details, contact
  <a href="mailto:js@example.com">John Smith</a>.
 </address>
 <p><small>© copyright 2038 Example Corp.</small></p>
</footer>

<p>Example Corp today announced record profits for the
second quarter <small>(Full Disclosure: Foo News is a subsidiary of
Example Corp)</small>, leading to speculation about a third quarter
merger with Demo Group.</p>

<aside>
 <h1>Example Corp</h1>
 <p>This company mostly creates small software and Web
 sites.</p>
 <p>The Example Corp company mission is "To provide entertainment
 and news on a sample basis".</p>
 <p><small>Information obtained from <a
 href="http://example.com/about.html">example.com</a> home
 page.</small></p>
</aside>

<p><strong><small>Continued use of this service will result in a kiss.</small></strong></p>

The dfn element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content, but there must be no descendant dfn elements.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

Also, the title attribute has special semantics on this element.

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The dfn element represents the defining instance of a term. The paragraph, description list group, or section that is the nearest ancestor of the dfn element must also contain the definition(s) for the term given by the dfn element.

Defining term: If the dfn element has a title attribute, then the exact value of that attribute is the term being defined. Otherwise, if it contains exactly one element child node and no child text nodes, and that child element is an abbr element with a title attribute, then the exact value of that attribute is the term being defined. Otherwise, it is the exact textContent of the dfn element that gives the term being defined.

If the title attribute of the dfn element is present, then it must contain only the term being defined.

The title attribute of ancestor elements does not affect dfn elements.

An a element that links to a dfn element represents an instance of the term defined by the dfn element.

<p>The <dfn><abbr title="Garage Door Opener">GDO</abbr></dfn>
is a device that allows off-world teams to open the iris.</p>
<!-- ... later in the document: -->
<p>Teal'c activated his <abbr title="Garage Door Opener">GDO</abbr>
and so Hammond ordered the iris to be opened.</p>

<p>The <dfn id=gdo><abbr title="Garage Door Opener">GDO</abbr></dfn>
is a device that allows off-world teams to open the iris.</p>
<!-- ... later in the document: -->
<p>Teal'c activated his <a href=#gdo><abbr title="Garage Door Opener">GDO</abbr></a>
and so Hammond ordered the iris to be opened.</p>

The abbr element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

Also, the title attribute has special semantics on this element.

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The abbr element represents an abbreviation or acronym, optionally with its expansion. The title attribute may be used to provide an expansion of the abbreviation. The attribute, if specified, must contain an expansion of the abbreviation, and nothing else.

<p>The <dfn id=whatwg><abbr title="Web Hypertext Application
Technology Working Group">WHATWG</abbr></dfn> is a loose
unofficial collaboration of Web browser manufacturers and interested
parties who wish to develop new technologies designed to allow authors
to write and deploy Applications over the World Wide Web.</p>

<p>The <dfn id=whatwg>Web Hypertext Application Technology
Working Group</dfn> (<abbr title="Web Hypertext Application
Technology Working Group">WHATWG</abbr>) is a loose unofficial
collaboration of Web browser manufacturers and interested parties who
wish to develop new technologies designed to allow authors to write
and deploy Applications over the World Wide Web.</p>

<p>The <abbr title="Web Hypertext Application Technology Working
Group">WHATWG</abbr> started working on HTML5 in 2004.</p>

<p>The <a href="#whatwg"><abbr title="Web Hypertext Application
Technology Working Group">WHATWG</abbr></a> community does not
have much representation from Asia.</p>

<p>Philip` and Dashiva both denied that they were going to
get the issue counts from past revisions of the specification to
backfill the <abbr>WHATWG</abbr> issue graph.</p>

If an abbreviation is pluralized, the expansion's grammatical number (plural vs singular) must match the grammatical number of the contents of the element.

<p>Two <abbr title="Working Group">WG</abbr>s worked on
this specification: the <abbr>WHATWG</abbr> and the
<abbr>HTMLWG</abbr>.</p>

<p>Two <abbr title="Working Groups">WGs</abbr> worked on
this specification: the <abbr>WHATWG</abbr> and the
<abbr>HTMLWG</abbr>.</p>

Abbreviations do not have to be marked up using this element. It is expected to be useful in the following cases:

• Abbreviations for which the author wants to give expansions, where using the abbr element with a title attribute is an alternative to including the expansion inline (e.g. in parentheses).
• Abbreviations that are likely to be unfamiliar to the document's readers, for which authors are encouraged to either mark up the abbreviation using a abbr element with a title attribute or include the expansion inline in the text the first time the abbreviation is used.
• Abbreviations whose presence needs to be semantically annotated, e.g. so that they can be identified from a style sheet and given specific styles, for which the abbr element can be used without a title attribute.

Providing an expansion in a title attribute once will not necessarily cause other abbr elements in the same document with the same contents but without a title attribute to behave as if they had the same expansion. Every abbr element is independent.

The code element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The code element represents a fragment of computer code. This could be an XML element name, a filename, a computer program, or any other string that a computer would recognize.

Although there is no formal way to indicate the language of computer code being marked up, authors who wish to mark code elements with the language used, e.g. so that syntax highlighting scripts can use the right rules, may do so by adding a class prefixed with "language-" to the element.

<p>The <code>code</code> element represents a fragment of computer
code.</p>

<p>When you call the <code>activate()</code> method on the
<code>robotSnowman</code> object, the eyes glow.</p>

<p>The example below uses the <code>begin</code> keyword to indicate
the start of a statement block. It is paired with an <code>end</code>
keyword, which is followed by the <code>.</code> punctuation character
(full stop) to indicate the end of the program.</p>

<pre><code class="language-pascal">var i: Integer;
begin
   i := 1;
end.</code></pre>

See the pre element for more details.

The var element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The var element represents a variable. This could be an actual variable in a mathematical expression or programming context, or it could just be a term used as a placeholder in prose.

<p>If there are <var>n</var> pipes leading to the ice
cream factory then I expect at <em>least</em> <var>n</var>
flavours of ice cream to be available for purchase!</p>

For mathematics, in particular for anything beyond the simplest of expressions, MathML is more appropriate. However, the var element can still be used to refer to specific variables that are then mentioned in MathML expressions.

<figure>
 <math>
  <mi>a</mi>
  <mo>=</mo>
  <msqrt>
   <msup><mi>b</mi><mn>2</mn></msup>
   <mi>+</mi>
   <msup><mi>c</mi><mn>2</mn></msup>
  </msqrt>
 </math>
 <legend> 
  Using Pythagoras' theorem to solve for the hypotenuse <var>a</var> of
  a triangle with sides <var>b</var> and <var>c</var>
 </legend>
</figure>

The samp element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The samp element represents (sample) output from a program or computing system.

See the pre and kbd elements for more details.

<p>The computer said <samp>Too much cheese in tray
two</samp> but I didn't know what that meant.</p>

<pre><samp><samp class="prompt">jdoe@mowmow:~$</samp> <kbd>ssh demo.example.com</kbd>
Last login: Tue Apr 12 09:10:17 2005 from mowmow.example.com on pts/1
Linux demo 2.6.10-grsec+gg3+e+fhs6b+nfs+gr0501+++p3+c4a+gr2b-reslog-v6.189 #1 SMP Tue Feb 1 11:22:36 PST 2005 i686 unknown

<samp class="prompt">jdoe@demo:~$</samp> <samp class="cursor">_</samp></samp></pre>

The kbd element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The kbd element represents user input (typically keyboard input, although it may also be used to represent other input, such as voice commands).

When the kbd element is nested inside a samp element, it represents the input as it was echoed by the system.

When the kbd element contains a samp element, it represents input based on system output, for example invoking a menu item.

When the kbd element is nested inside another kbd element, it represents an actual key or other single unit of input as appropriate for the input mechanism.

<p>To make George eat an apple, press <kbd><kbd>Shift</kbd>+<kbd>F3</kbd></kbd></p>

<p>To make George eat an apple, select
    <kbd><kbd><samp>File</samp></kbd>|<kbd><samp>Eat Apple...</samp></kbd></kbd>
</p>

The sub and sup elements

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which these elements may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The sup element represents a superscript and the sub element represents a subscript.

These elements must be used only to mark up typographical conventions with specific meanings, not for typographical presentation for presentation's sake. For example, it would be inappropriate for the sub and sup elements to be used in the name of the LaTeX document preparation system. In general, authors should use these elements only if the absence of those elements would change the meaning of the content.

When the sub element is used inside a var element, it represents the subscript that identifies the variable in a family of variables.

<p>The coordinate of the <var>i</var>th point is
(<var>x<sub><var>i</var></sub></var>, <var>y<sub><var>i</var></sub></var>).
For example, the 10th point has coordinate
(<var>x<sub>10</sub></var>, <var>y<sub>10</sub></var>).</p>

In certain languages, superscripts are part of the typographical conventions for some abbreviations.

<p>The most beautiful women are
<span lang="fr"><abbr>M<sup>lle</sup></abbr> Gwendoline</span> and 
<span lang="fr"><abbr>M<sup>me</sup></abbr> Denise</span>.</p>

Mathematical expressions often use subscripts and superscripts. Authors are encouraged to use MathML for marking up mathematics, but authors may opt to use sub and sup if detailed mathematical markup is not desired. [MathML]

<var>E</var>=<var>m</var><var>c</var><sup>2</sup>

f(<var>x</var>, <var>n</var>) = log<sub>4</sub><var>x</var><sup><var>n</var></sup>

The span element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The span element doesn't mean anything on its own, but can be useful when used together with other attributes, e.g. class, lang, or dir. It represents its children.

The i element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized.

Terms in languages different from the main text should be annotated with lang attributes (xml:lang in XML).

<p>The <i class="taxonomy">Felis silvestris catus</i> is cute.</p>
<p>The term <i>prose content</i> is defined above.</p>
<p>There is a certain <i lang="fr">je ne sais quoi</i> in the air.</p>

<p>Raymond tried to sleep.</p>
<p><i>The ship sailed away on Thursday</i>, he
dreamt. <i>The ship had many people aboard, including a beautiful
princess called Carey. He watched her, day-in, day-out, hoping she
would notice him, but she never did.</i></p>
<p><i>Finally one night he picked up the courage to speak with
her—</i></p>
<p>Raymond woke with a start as the fire alarm rang out.</p>

Authors are encouraged to use the class attribute on the i element to identify why the element is being used, so that if the style of a particular use (e.g. dream sequences as opposed to taxonomic terms) is to be changed at a later date, the author doesn't have to go through the entire document (or series of related documents) annotating each use. Similarly, authors are encouraged to consider whether other elements might be more applicable than the i element, for instance the em element for marking up stress emphasis, or the dfn element to mark up the defining instance of a term.

Style sheets can be used to format i elements, just like any other element can be restyled. Thus, it is not the case that content in i elements will necessarily be italicized.

The b element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The b element represents a span of text to be stylistically offset from the normal prose without conveying any extra importance, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, or other spans of text whose typical typographic presentation is boldened.

<p>The <b>frobonitor</b> and <b>barbinator</b> components are fried.</p>

<p>You enter a small room. Your <b>sword</b> glows
brighter. A <b>rat</b> scurries past the corner wall.</p>

<article>
 <h2>Kittens 'adopted' by pet rabbit</h2>
 <p><b>Six abandoned kittens have found an unexpected new
 mother figure — a pet rabbit.</b></p>
 <p>Veterinary nurse Melanie Humble took the three-week-old
 kittens to her Aberdeen home.</p>
[...]

The b element should be used as a last resort when no other element is more appropriate. In particular, headers should use the h1 to h6 elements, stress emphasis should use the em element, importance should be denoted with the strong element, and text marked or highlighted should use the mark element.

<p><b>WARNING!</b> Do not frob the barbinator!</p>

Style sheets can be used to format b elements, just like any other element can be restyled. Thus, it is not the case that content in b elements will necessarily be boldened.

The bdo element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

Also, the dir global attribute has special semantics on this element.

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The bdo element represents explicit text directionality formatting control for its children. It allows authors to override the Unicode bidi algorithm by explicitly specifying a direction override. [BIDI]

Authors must specify the dir attribute on this element, with the value ltr to specify a left-to-right override and with the value rtl to specify a right-to-left override.

If the element has the dir attribute set to the exact value ltr, then for the purposes of the bidi algorithm, the user agent must act as if there was a U+202D LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE character at the start of the element, and a U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING at the end of the element.

If the element has the dir attribute set to the exact value rtl, then for the purposes of the bidi algorithm, the user agent must act as if there was a U+202E RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE character at the start of the element, and a U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING at the end of the element.

The requirements on handling the bdo element for the bidi algorithm may be implemented indirectly through the style layer. For example, an HTML+CSS user agent should implement these requirements by implementing the CSS unicode-bidi property. [CSS21]

The ruby element

Categories

Flow content.

Phrasing content.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

Where phrasing content is expected.

Content model:

One or more groups of: phrasing content followed either by a single rt element, or an rp element, an rt element, and another rp element.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The ruby element allows one or more spans of phrasing content to be marked with ruby annotations. Ruby annotations are short runs of text presented alongside base text, primarily used in East Asian typography as a guide for pronounciation or to include other annotations. In Japanese, this form of typography is also known as furigana.

A ruby element represents the spans of phrasing content it contains, ignoring all the child rt and rp elements and their descendants. Those spans of phrasing content have associated annotations created using the rt element.

... 
<ruby>
 漢 <rt> かん </rt>
 字 <rt> じ　 </rt>
</ruby>
...

<ruby>
 漢 <rt> ㄏㄢˋ </rt>
 字 <rt> ㄗˋ　 </rt>
</ruby>

...
<ruby>
 汉 <rt> hàn </rt>
 字 <rt> zì  </rt>
</ruby>
...

The rt element

Categories

None.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

As a child of a ruby element.

Content model:

Phrasing content.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The rt element marks the ruby text component of a ruby annotation.

An rt element that is a child of a ruby element represents an annotation (given by its children) for the zero or more nodes of phrasing content that immediately precedes it in the ruby element, ignoring rp elements.

An rt element that is not a child of a ruby element represents the same thing as its children.

The rp element

Categories

None.

Contexts in which this element may be used:

As a child of a ruby element, either immediately before or immediately after an rt element.

Content model:

If the rp element is immediately after an rt element that is immediately preceded by another rp element: a single character from Unicode character class Pe.

Otherwise: a single character from Unicode character class Ps.

Content attributes:

Global attributes

DOM interface:

Uses HTMLElement.

The rp element can be used to provide parentheses around a ruby text component of a ruby annotation, to be shown by user agents that don't support ruby annotations.

An rp element that is a child of a ruby element represents nothing and it and its contents must be ignored. An rp element whose parent element is not a ruby element represents its children.