- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 08:56:21 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-style@w3.org
> You're quite mistaken. HTML introduced explicit versioning as of HTML 4. > See section 7.2 "HTML version information" in the HTML 4.01 specification. > [1] The last HTML version in which DOCTYPE and therefore version information wasn't mandatory was HTML 2.0. However DOCTYPE is still ignored by many developers in material that is clearly not HTML 2.0, and is almost never correctly specified in browser specific supersets of HTML 4.01. > Versioning was included in the specification precisely because quirks mode > was unmanageable. My perception is that quirks mode use of version information postdated the introduction of mandatory DOCTYPEs. Another key point about versioning is that it is a key aim of the web that users not be forced to continually update their software and hardware, so documents should be designed to degrade gracefully. In real life, authors are not going to produce multiple versions, beyond the IE6 "optimised" and Firefox tolerant versions.
Received on Sunday, 3 July 2005 08:23:06 UTC