1  AutoFormat.RemoveEmpty
 2  TYPE: bool
 3  VERSION: 3.2.0
 4  DEFAULT: false
 5  --DESCRIPTION--
 6  <p>
 7    When enabled, HTML Purifier will attempt to remove empty elements that
 8    contribute no semantic information to the document. The following types
 9    of nodes will be removed:
10  </p>
11  <ul><li>
12      Tags with no attributes and no content, and that are not empty
13      elements (remove <code>&lt;a&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</code> but not
14      <code>&lt;br /&gt;</code>), and
15    </li>
16    <li>
17      Tags with no content, except for:<ul>
18        <li>The <code>colgroup</code> element, or</li>
19        <li>
20          Elements with the <code>id</code> or <code>name</code> attribute,
21          when those attributes are permitted on those elements.
22        </li>
23      </ul></li>
24  </ul>
25  <p>
26    Please be very careful when using this functionality; while it may not
27    seem that empty elements contain useful information, they can alter the
28    layout of a document given appropriate styling. This directive is most
29    useful when you are processing machine-generated HTML, please avoid using
30    it on regular user HTML.
31  </p>
32  <p>
33    Elements that contain only whitespace will be treated as empty. Non-breaking
34    spaces, however, do not count as whitespace. See
35    %AutoFormat.RemoveEmpty.RemoveNbsp for alternate behavior.
36  </p>
37  <p>
38    This algorithm is not perfect; you may still notice some empty tags,
39    particularly if a node had elements, but those elements were later removed
40    because they were not permitted in that context, or tags that, after
41    being auto-closed by another tag, where empty. This is for safety reasons
42    to prevent clever code from breaking validation. The general rule of thumb:
43    if a tag looked empty on the way in, it will get removed; if HTML Purifier
44    made it empty, it will stay.
45  </p>
46  --# vim: et sw=4 sts=4