RE: Is "breaking the Web" with HTML 5 a non issue?

Yes, I am in agreement. Boris also raised a number of excellent points as
well.

Sometimes I wish I could be more closed minded to the possibility of being
wrong. :)

It looks like even dropping DOCTYPE would cause problems, since it would
then trigger "quirks mode" and cause HTML 5 to be rendered in a really poor
manner...

... unless we drop DOCTYPE, but have a <meta> which declares to document to
be HTML 5, so the logic was "If no DOCTYPE, then use 'quirks mode' unless
<meta HTML-version=5>"...

... which would be really clumsy and error prone.

On the other hand, "ignore DOCTYPE unless it is wrong, and then activate
'quirks mode'" is very clumsy and error prone as well.

J.Ja

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philip TAYLOR in Bolsehle [mailto:Ralf.Kahle@t-online.de]
> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 4:07 PM
> To: L. David Baron
> Cc: Sam Kuper; Justin James; Andrew Sidwell; public-html@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Is "breaking the Web" with HTML 5 a non issue?
> 
> Much as I wish it were not true, I cannot
> fault the majority of David's analysis.
> The one point with which I would take
> issue is the last :
> 
> > Yet another problem would be that there are many documents on the
> > Web today that declare themselves as being one version of HTML, yet
> > use features from other versions.  Web browsers
> > that display documents on the Web well enough that users will use
> > such browsers must handle these documents, including the features
> > that are in the wrong version.  This would require, in order to get
> > interoperability, that the handling of those features be added to
> > the specifications (above) for HTML4, HTML 3.2, etc.
> 
> This is, I suggest, taking the concept of "not breaking
> the web" one step too far.  These documents are defective/
> faulty/broken/plain "wrong".  To continue to support them
> serves only to deny that fact.
> 
> Philip TAYLOR

Received on Monday, 22 September 2008 20:27:24 UTC