[icedtea-web] RFC: More javadoc fixes for Java 8

[Jacob Wisor]

On 05/12/2014 02:41 PM Severin Gehwolf wrote:
> On 10/05/2014 04:07 AM Jacob Wisor wrote:
>> On 5/10/2014 2:14 AM Omair Majid wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I recently tried compiling icedtea-web with java 8 and ran into more
>>> javadoc issues. Apparently, self-enclosing tags (<br/>) are now not
>>> allowed either.
>>
>> Self-enclosing elements are actually required by the XML specification, hence
>> also by XHTML. Please do not remove them.
>
> The premises on which doclint warnings are based is HTML 4.01
> Transitional Loose[1].

Yes, I know. But, it /should/ transition to XHTML 1.1 and soon to XHTML 2. HTML 
is going to become obsolete as a standard soon, although HTML will continue to 
be supported by probably most browsers and tools in the foreseeable future. 
Nevertheless, I would advise to use XHTML compliant elements and their forms in 
source code documentation only. This way, the source code documentation is kept 
future proof. ... Yes, there are tools that help to migrating or transitioning 
existing HTML documents to XHTML, so this may look easy and not a problem. But, 
usually they have caveats and are not much help for large sets of documents. 
Keeping the source future proof is the best approach, I would assume.

This patch is not wrong, but it is fighting a problem that is going to be fought 
even more so in the future when HTML becomes definitely obsolete.

Jacob