Re: Proposed Design Principles review

On 4/26/07, Dannii <curiousdannii@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'break'. I don't think it would
> be acceptable to change anything that would make 99% of the web unusable. I
> do think that it would be okay to change the rendering of those pages, if
> they were never being rendered correctly in the first place.
>
> It depends on the level of changes I think. Trying to keep pixel-perfect
> precision with broken pages is ridiculous. If someone was using a table for
> layouts with sliced image backgrounds, I don't think we should be forced to
> ensure that their slices still line up properly.
>


You need to be very careful about your working definition of "correctly".
An HTML page exactly rendered to the HTML standard is a fantasy - a pleasant
fantasy, perhaps, but not something real.  Standards are a means to an end,
not the end itself.  What is real is a page as rendered by on the user's
desktop by the browser in use.

A page that renders so as the fulfill the user's purpose is "correct".    If
we change that behavior in a way that interferes this the user ... I would
not want to call that bit of unpleasantness "correct".  Changing the
behavior of existing pages is not nice.