Re: ISSUE-155 counter proposal

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 1:59 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> The HTML feature that should trigger them to actually draw table borders
> is simply <table>.

This is not compatible with web content, so it's very unlikely that
any non-CSS browser will actually do it.  Are rendering expectations
only supposed to reflect reality for major implementations, or also
non-major implementations like text browsers?  What's the
justification for expecting behavior from text browsers that you know
they won't follow?

Also, the Rendering section says that "User agents that use other
presentation mechanisms [than CSS] can derive their expected behavior
by translating from the CSS rules given in this section."  This
suggests that there should be no distinction between how CSS and
non-CSS UAs should try to display things.  Why should there be?  The
author almost surely intended the page to display in a CSS browser, so
to reflect the author's intent, non-CSS UAs should try to reflect what
a CSS UA would render as closely as they can.  This means at least
supporting the default rendering.  So if you want non-CSS browsers to
draw borders around all tables, even though CSS-supporting UAs don't,
that contradicts the expectations you wrote down in the Rendering
section.

Received on Friday, 25 March 2011 16:48:10 UTC