- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:59:55 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Jeff Schiller <codedread@gmail.com>
- Cc: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@x-port.net>, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Mon, 25 Jun 2007, Jeff Schiller wrote:
>
> I have a question about using the new semantic elements like <section>,
> <article>, <aside>, etc in a backwards-compatible way. Is there an
> appropriate way to use them such that they HTML4- user agents can render
> them but I can take advantage of any default rendering a HTML5+ user
> agent will have?
>
> Let's say I have:
>
> <!DOCTYPE html>
> <html><body>
> <section>
> <h1>This Is A HTML5 Document</h1>
> <p>It is really keen.</p>
> <aside>You don't hear "keen" alot these days, do you?</aside>
> <p>But not too many UAs support it yet.</p>
> </section>
> </body></html>
>
> All browsers at the moment will render the contents of the <aside>
> element as default styling of a paragraph, I guess.
Actually IE won't even do that, sadly (IE treats all unknown element start
and end tags as empty elements). In Mozilla, the above works for elements
that only contain inline content (so it'd work for the <aside> but not the
<section>). In Safari and Opera it works fine.
> But I assume that once HTML5 UAs become "aside-aware" then some default
> styling will be present for the <aside> elements. In the meantime, what
> are my options as a web author - if I try to style the <aside> elements
> with a <style> element in the head:
>
> <style type="text/css">
> aside { background-color:yellow; border-style:solid; float:right;}
> </style>
>
> then I'll override any default styling (which might be nicer) in future
> UAs. Is my only option to leave them unstyled?
It's actually likely that we won't introduce default styling for many of
these elements, for exactly this reason. Even if we do, though, I don't
think there's really a problem -- most authors would rather the markup
render the same in all browsers, whether new or old. So they'd apply
styles in all cases.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Monday, 25 June 2007 21:00:18 UTC