Re: HTML 5

It is presumably in the interest of the makers of the browser to figure out what 
standard is being followed on any given page (made much easier by the DOCTYPE 
switch) and render according to that. It is also presumably the responsibility 
of those UA makers to retain compatibility for deprecated standards for however 
long makes sense. After all, all the browsers I know support CSS1,and we're 
looking at widespread adoption of CSS3.

Simply because a new standard is being created does not mean that all the pages 
must switch over to it. At least, not immediately. That is why the standards are 
numbered, and why there is a mechanism to declare what standard is being used.

The newer versions of the standard are being created because we are learning how 
we want to use the web. If we never changed standards in any areas, we'd have a 
much tougher time. (A good example of this is Unicode: I'm a linguist and if we 
never adopted the Unicode standard and just stuck with ASCII, doing my 
day-to-day work would be much, much harder. I shudder to think of all those code 
pages...)

As a web developer and unabashed standardista, I think that HTML5 is a wonderful 
idea. We're shedding most of the deprecated elements, moving more towards 
semanticity (I'm a linguist, it's a word, so there), and modeling our tools so 
they help us create the web we want to create.

I understand where you're coming from - I had a similar debate with a colleague 
the other day. But I think that, instead of trying to prevent HTML5, we should 
look at how long we want our UAs to preserve rendering deprecated standards as 
long as they declare themselves to be said standards.

Received on Thursday, 10 April 2008 17:40:51 UTC