- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 23:14:50 +1000
- To: Gareth Hay <gazhay@gmail.com>
- CC: Doug Schepers <doug.schepers@vectoreal.com>, public-html@w3.org
Gareth Hay wrote: > I don't understand the issue. > > Surely any browser manufacturer is always going to have a mode that will > render older pages. Mozilla, Opera and Safari will have the following modes: * Quirks Mode * Almost standards mode * Standards mode (though I have seen discussion elsewhere about merging standards and almost standards into a single mode, by adopting the few almost standards quirks into the relevant specs.) Unfortunately, IE will have those, plus a new mode for nearly every new browser version released. > What is preventing them having an HTML5 mode, which may or may not build > upon their previous engine. > > That way, you visit a page that you used to (google, bank, etc) browser > uses 'old' mode. > You visit an HTML5 page, browser uses the new mode. > > Why is this a problem? There are several problems with that, all of which have been mentioned several times on this list. * It doesn't help improve interoperability for legacy content. * New browsers in the future will still be forced to reverse engineer legacy browsers, instead of just implementing the spec. * Browser vendors (except for IE) don't want to maintain more different modes for for HTML because it increases complexity and cost. (see the versioning threads) * Every new mode that is introduced, introduces a new mode that may need to be reverse engineered and specced. There are probably more that I can't remember off hand, please search the archives. -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
Received on Friday, 27 April 2007 13:15:24 UTC