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Rationale
This document serves a rationale document for various parts of the HTML5 specification. Over time this page will be a complete rationale document.
Other Pages
Specific Elements
Plaintext
the <plaintext> element was an early IE version of the <pre> element. It is now used in the HTML5 spec as a method of stopping all further html token parsing. It lacks an end tag and just emits the rest of the page as plain text. It throws a parse error upon reaching the end of the document as it is not considered a valid element (and it is missing an end-tag).
Image
<image> element is treated as an alternate (but invalid) name for <img>. This is because some sites (around 0.2%) make this mistake. It is already treated as an image in Firefox 3.5+ and opera 10.20 and possibly earlier.