Re: A Compromise to the Versioning Debate

> 
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Why would designed-for-ie-version='7' be better than e.g. tested-with-
>> current-browser-versions-on='2007-04-16'?
> 
>    Because:
> 
> 1) No one will remember what date the browser with the bug came out on.
> 
> 2) The date is meaningless if you don't know what browser it applies to.
> If a page depends on a bug in IE7, the date won't tell you that.
> 
> 3) Because the date is meaningless outside the context of a browser,
> Internet Explorer will be assumed and the attribute ends up being a
> really poor way of saying "designed-for-ie-version='7.0'".
> 
>    As a result of all of the above, we need an attribute that describes
> the browser and the version rather than a point in time. Perhaps
> something like this:
> 
> | <html bugmode="IE7"> [...] </html>
> 
>    When IE8 comes out and some pages break, Microsoft tells everyone
> they can fix it by just adding the |bugmode| attribute. In fact, they
> can do so preemptively. It's not ideal, but doing the opposite and
> assuming bugs unless a switch is used has two serious problems:
> 
> 1) There's no explicit information indicating that the page depends on
> any bugs.
> 
> 2) Standards-compliant pages that are conforming before a switch is
> introduced will suddenly break because they don't account for the bugs
> introduced after the specification they comply with.
> 


+1, I think... ; )



-- Dylan Smith

Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2007 04:32:40 UTC