Re: Change Proposal for ISSUE-125

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 7:13 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Nov 2010, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>
>> But as long as you don't supply evidence that all of them do the *same*
>> wrong thing, there's no reason to require that behavior "for
>> compatibility with existing content".
>
> FWIW: I'm not going to write a counter-change-proposal on this issue. I
> don't personally care what we end up converging on, I just think it's a
> waste of everyone's time to make what we converge on be anything but the
> minimum distance from where we are now. However, if the working group can
> convince the browser vendors to make a bigger change to their behaviour,
> that's fine by me. My only concern is that by speccing something further
> away from the status quo than possible, we end up pushing the point in
> time at which we'll reach interoperability to even further away, and I
> really think that's bad for the Web. So whatever we do, I think we should
> make sure the browser vendors are on board to implement what we end up
> speccing.
>
> Note that eventually, when the browser vendors converge on something,
> that's what we'll have to update the spec to say anyway, regardless of
> what we think of what the browsers do.

The best solution to a whole group of problems here is IMHO to define
that <meta http-equiv> has no relation to HTTP headers at all. Any and
all similarities with http and http headers is a historical artifact.

As has been established on this list a long time ago this feature was
originally intended to be used by servers, but for some reason (to me
unknown) browsers starter paying attention to it. While there are
servers that do honor the feature as originally designed, the total
number of installations compared to the total number of websites on
the web speaks to that this feature is a failure. I do think this is
unfortunate, but it is nevertheless what data points to.

By defining that http-equiv isn't related to http at all, we can
remove *all* willful violations, since the only spec we'd be following
is HTML5. And removing willful violations is the expressed goal of
several parties (me included).

It would also save the working group time by invalidating this and other issues.

/ Jonas

Received on Sunday, 14 November 2010 04:16:17 UTC