RE: [HTML5] 2.8 Character encodings

Ian Hickson:
>On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:
>>
>> There is no indication, that this might be 'HTML5'. Therefore no
>> specific rule from the 'HTML5' draft needs to be applied.
>
>"text/html" is the indication that the HTML5 spec applies. (Or at least, 
>that will be the case once we update the text/html registration.)


This would be really a big backwards incompatibility, because
it is not obvious, what to send for previous HTML versions.
And even if this is known, authors of document using old 
HTML versions have to switch this information. Old browsern
will not know about this switch and may not be able anymore
to interprete such old documents. 
I think, such a change would corrupt at least the text/html
variants of (X)HTML completely.

And of course, if a document (for example in a local file
system) has no such 'text/html' indication, but has a 
version indication (doctype) for HTML4, it is obvious, that
this is no 'HTML5' document. And it is not obvious, that
a document without a version indication is intended to
be 'HTML5'.


Olaf

Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 08:56:54 UTC