- From: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 23:15:26 +0100
- To: "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- CC: olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>, www-validator@w3.org
L. David Baron wrote: > The goal of DOCTYPE sniffing was that newly-written pages should be in > standards mode and old pages should be in quirks mode. In other words, > DOCTYPE sniffing was used as a heuristic to determine which pages were > written after Mozilla became a known user-agent on the Web (as I wrote > in the URL you cite). Since pages with SYSTEM doctype declarations were > not common on the Web around 2001, such pages are treated as pages > written with knowledge of Mozilla's existence, and are therefore handled > in standards mode. OK, understood. Unfortunately it doesn't help in the present situation, as use of a SYSTEM doctype unfortunately confuses the validator and causes it not to know whether to use an SGML or XML parsing model :-( What a shame that the W3C and the major browser vendors can't agree on something like a head-region pragmat to trigger standards mode, maybe along the lines of <!-- #PRAGMAT mode="Full-standards" --> <!-- #PRAGMAT mode="Almost-standards" --> <!-- #PRAGMAT mode="Quirks" --> Philip Taylor.
Received on Thursday, 13 July 2006 22:13:53 UTC