I can't believe the committee approved this spec without consulting me. I can see that I'm not the only one that feels this degree of agency in syntax is a bridge too far. Clearly this part of the spec was written by a Ruby developer.
The specification is just codifying what browsers already did in practice.
There was a time when people thought we might be able to change web development practice and browsers to something more consistent, but (a) what they chose was XHTML and (b) the benefit of switching was not there.
