Re: Cleaning House

On 5/3/07 12:48 AM, "Lee Roberts" <lee_roberts@roserockdesign.com> wrote:

> What I get out of all the chatter about deprecated tags being supported
> FOREVER is somewhere along the line of people don't know how to make
> standards.  This is evident in HTML4.x and XHTML1.x with deprecated tags.
> If we're smart and we will set up a DOCTYPE HTML5 which people can use, then
> Browser Vendors can easily support the author's desired standard set.  If
> the author fails to use DOCTYPE HTML5 then Browser Vendors can take the
> assumption that they need to fall back to previous standard support mode.
> 
> This falls in line with IEEE and other standards bodies.  Backward
> compatibility still exists, but we are no longer required to deal with
> deprecated codes.  Eventually, instead of NEVER, we will have a standard
> that works.
> 
> Browser Vendors would need to build support for the new standard on top of
> their support for older standards.  Yet, this does not mean we need to
> continue support for deprecated tags or tags we NOW realize we don't need.
> I foresee HTML6 getting rid of some of the new stuff being submitted for
> consideration in the HTML5 standard.


...I'll just say what's alrady been said...again...

The browser vendors will forever continue to support every tag that has ever
been used because there are already millions of pages using them, including
some really popular ones like (I guess) Myspace and everything similar to
myspace (like blackplanet).

Yes the browser vendors will have a cutoff point between the old quirks and
new standards BUT the curren browser vendors have millions of dollars and
almost many many many years worth of code behind their browsers. If we don't
DOCUMENT the quirky behaviours of today's quirks modes in the various
browsers, no future browser vendor will be able to gain market share quickly
because they will need about 3 or 4 years to reverse engineer the quirks
mode behavior of the current top browsers.

We only need to document quirks this one time and THEN we can forget about
it. Document now, then, forget about it forever.

Why is quirksmode important?
Because 5 years from now the number of doctype-less and css-less web pages
will still vastly outnumber the modern standards compliant web pages.

Authors will be fully informed by validators (like they are today) when they
use a deprecated or obsolete tag. Or when they use something incorrectly.

Sure the browsers _could_ throw warnings and error messages all over badly
written pages but no browser company with any desire to gain market share
will ever do that.

There will be only one standard. HTML5 will contain:
* Old stuff that works and makes sense and is useful
* New stuff that adds value and new features and ease of use (over time some
will be changed or removed until we get them just right)
* The old bad stuff that is still be in use on pages written 9 years ago
that still get a lot of traffic because they contain useful information.

> I don't know who WHATWG is.  As far as I know it is a group of people who
> didn't like W3's processes.  As far as I understand, the people of this
> group decided to go about their own path and create a new standard.  This
> only causes more problems because Browser Vendors, Editor Vendors, and Web
> designers can now follow two camps.  The first camp follows the WHATWG.  The
> second camp follows W3.  Seems like a lot of confusion to me.

You're confused because you're obviously uninformsed.

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Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 13:57:41 UTC