Chore: Remove invalid closing and , self-closing slashes, xml:lang and xmlns

[patrickhlauke]

Removes all sorts of unnecessary XHTML cruft that we kept carrying around due to the old XSLT-based publication pipeline which is now obsolete

[netlify]

✅ Deploy Preview for wcag2 ready!

Name	Link
🔨 Latest commit	8311ef2
🔍 Latest deploy log	https://app.netlify.com/projects/wcag2/deploys/6839d4113f814a0008dc7f86
😎 Deploy Preview	https://deploy-preview-4386--wcag2.netlify.app
📱 Preview on mobile	Toggle QR Code... Use your smartphone camera to open QR code link.

---

To edit notification comments on pull requests, go to your Netlify project configuration.

[patrickhlauke]

Assume we could expand this to also remove the xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

[kfranqueiro]

The link tags look like they weren't modified correctly; there is now a doubled closing bracket in every link tag.

Also, I would point out that the build system is fixing these (without the self-closing tag). If I look for these instances in the live pages, I don't see them in the code that is output. So I'm wondering if this isn't worth the effort (and potential for conflicts) to merge, somewhat akin to #3927 which we closed last week after your suggestion.

[fstrr]

Assume we could expand this to also remove the xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

Oh yeah. I've been wanting to yoink them for ages but wasn't sure if we were keeping them around for some reason.

[patrickhlauke]

The link tags look like they weren't modified correctly; there is now a doubled closing bracket in every link tag.

oops, fat finger typo. I corrected it and force-pushed

Regarding potential for conflicts: I think this sort of change should be fine to make, as it would only collide in cases where a PR already made some changes to those bits of the pages...

[patrickhlauke]

Expanded this PR to remove other XHTML-style rubbish that's now unnecessary (as we're not bound to the XSLT pipeline to build the documents).

Controversial perhaps, but: although this crud may be getting automagically removed at actual build time, it would be nice to just rip this plaster off swiftly once and decrap at source. Again, this should not present a big risk of merge conflicts - possibly just a handful of manual tweaks needed for any PRs currently in flight if they affected any images where we're now removing the self-closing slash, for instance

[kfranqueiro]

I have spent the past ~45 minutes reviewing these changes to check for any unintentional changes, especially in the self-closing tag cleanup. (Thanks Francis for spotting the MathML instances.) I didn't find anything else unintentionally caught in that crossfire, but I did find some more tags to clean up.

I would point out this is changing files we typically have no interest in changing, so I'm wondering how we feel about them being included in this PR:

• conformance-challenges/index.html
• requirements/21/index.html and requirements/22/index.html
• Many files under wcag20/ which we generally avoid touching; I would particularly consider backing out changes here, as I am unsure if whatever build process they were involved in requires XHTML

If we want to back any of these out, I can do so quickly.

(Update 2025-05-30: We agreed on the call to back out these files, so I've added a commit to the branch that does so.)

In addition, note this touches guidelines/index.html and guidelines/relative-luminance.html, though not in ways that are at all consequential to the written content.

[patrickhlauke]

just a gentle nudge to not let this sit for too long, as the longer it's in this state, the more likely that it will start diverging from main in ways that aren't always easy to recover from...

[patrickhlauke]

thank you for the assist @kfranqueiro ... think that's now ok to do/send to AGWG/whatever

[mbgower]

@kfranqueiro I believe there were a few files you were going to remove or tweak before putting in front of working group?