Re: Version information

On Fri, 06 Apr 2007 19:37:55 +0200, Chris Wilson  
<Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> 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.

We're not? I think a large part of what this group should do is fixing  
HTML4. (A lot of this is already done by the HTML5 proposal.)


Also, I don't think that introducing versioning for HTML at this point  
would be a good idea. It makes:

* authoring more complex;
* testing more complex;
* developing new user agents more complex
* maintaining existing user agents more complex;
* specifications more complex.

Another problem is that user agents incrementally evolve and not implement  
a complete specification perfectly in one go. They'll have bugs in their  
initial implementation of features, et cetera.


> 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.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Friday, 6 April 2007 18:07:03 UTC