Inertness of HTML Elements in a shadow tree

Comparatively, a shadow tree can be seen as somewhere between just part of a document and itself being a document fragment. Since it is rendered, a shadow tree aims to retain the traits of a typical tree in a document. At the same time, it is an encapsulation abstraction, so it has to avoid affecting the document tree. Thus, the HTML elements must behave as specified [[!HTML]] in the shadow trees, with a few exceptions.

According to the [[!HTML]], some HTML Elements would have different behavior if they participate in a shadow tree, instead of a document tree, because their definitions require the elements to be in a document as a necessary condition for them to work. In other words, they shouldn't work if they participate in a shadow tree, even when they are in a shadow-including document. We must fill this gap because we expect that most of HTML Elements behave in the same way as in a document, as long as they are in a shadow-including document. See W3C Bug 26365 and Bug 27406 for the details. The following is the tentative summary of the discussions in the W3C bugs. We, however, haven't covered all HTML Elements and their behaviors here yet. For HTML Elements which are not explicitly stated here, they should *work* even in a shadow tree. We are trying to update [[!HTML]] itself, instead of having monkey patches here. If [[!HTML]] explains an element's behavior explicitly, it should be honored, instead of this section.

Some HTML Elements are classified into the following categories: