- From: Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>
- Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 10:37:55 -0700
- To: "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
[chair hat off] L. David Baron wrote: >We should be willing (when provided good reasons to do so) to define things that would require even the market leader to break compatibility. This is not acceptable. We cannot, and will not, break compatibility. If you give us a new version identifier whenever the specification of behavior changes, we can use that to opt the document in to the new behavior without breaking compatibility. >If we aren't, then we just become the committee to propose new features to IE's developers and then re-document them according to the bugs in IE's implementation. No - we need to provide sufficient version identification over time so that we can identify newer content. I'm happy to change IE's behavior to follow new specifications, as long as I'm not forced to change our behavior when presenting old documents, thus breaking compatibility. >But I think it should be one of the roles of this group to document the behavior that is needed to be able to browse the Web, which helps new browsers enter the market. That means specifying things to the level of detail that pages depend on, and it also means compromising on the details where existing implementations disagree. We are not specifying HTML 4.01 here. I'm happy to make HTML >4.01 have behavior based on "compromising details where existing implementations disagree," even when that means IE needs to change behavior - but not in a situation where that would break compatibility with a current web page. -Chris
Received on Friday, 6 April 2007 17:43:03 UTC