Re: Cleaning House

On Thu, 03 May 2007 11:11:33 +0200, David Dorward <david@dorward.me.uk>  
wrote:
> On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 08:53:21AM +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> However, breaking backwards compatibility is only possible when we
>> introduce a new format as explained on this list before (and that's not
>> the goal of the HTML WG). Hence, we have to make user agent requirements
>> that require support for the features we rather see people not using.
>> (Those features can still be non-conforming, obviously.)
>
> No, we don't. HTML 5/4.02/4.1 does not need to include legacy and
> proprietary features, a user agent can support both "new HTML" and
> "Legacy/Proprietary code" without the latter being specified in the
> former.

You can't specify parsing of the HTML syntax in such a way, unfortunately.  
It would also be way more editorial work that isn't really justified in  
any way. I would you suggest you look more into what's actually required  
to make this work as opposed to simply stating that it can (and should?)  
be done that way.


> For user agents that want to implement legacy and proprietry features,
> a seperate specification can be written.
>
> This may or may not require switching of parse modes for the markup
> based on some versioning information in HTML > 4.01.

Implementing yet another parser for HTML is not acceptable. Browsers  
already have to ship with a parser for HTML and one for XML. No need to  
add yet another one with its own share of bugs.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 09:18:31 UTC