Re: A Compromise to the Versioning Debate

On 15.04.2007, at 12:05, Mihai Sucan wrote:

> Le Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:43:48 +0300, Bruce Boughton  
> <bruce@bruceboughton.me.uk> a écrit:
>
>> Mihai Sucan wrote:
>>>
>>> While I personally want a switch like this "always standards- 
>>> mode", I don't agree with the assumption "we are competent enough  
>>> to make informed decisions for ourselves".
>>>
>>> [..] The majority of web developers working in companies *will*  
>>> make use of this switch unknowingly of the consequences, and then  
>>> they'll blame IE [n] for breaking their pages (because they  
>>> relied on some old bugs).
>>>
>>
>> To find themselves in this situation, they must first explicitly  
>> opt-in to HTML5 standards mode with <!DOCTYPE html>.  When IE9  
>> comes out and perhaps breaks their sites, they can then add the  
>> IE8 mode switch.  If they were competent enough to find out about  
>> <!DOCTYPE html> they should be competent enough to find the mode  
>> switch if hand coding.  I would not expect a programmer to program  
>> Java without referring to the API, so I don't see why we expect  
>> people hand-coding HTML not to refer to the spec.  For those that  
>> don't hand code their HTML, it is important that tools vendors  
>> expose this option.
>
> I don't agree with that.
>
> The majority of incompetent web developers use tutorials and copy/ 
> paste script, use frameworks and anything premade.
>
> Given such switch, frameworks will require it and will only tell  
> you "please copy/paste the following line at the beginning of the  
> HTML page". They'll spare the details, if you know what I mean.
>
> It is inevitable, given the switch, we will end up with tons of  
> documents relying on buggy behaviour in IE.next. IE n+1 will break  
> those pages if it doesn't add yet another switch.

Why even care about incompetent web developers? I don't want to start  
a discussion about the trade but seriously, being a web developer  
requires some skill that a lot of people just don't have. Catering  
for them and trying to make HTML as simple as possible so that these  
people won't have any problems is just weird. 

Received on Sunday, 15 April 2007 11:03:59 UTC