[Bug 9424] Conformance checking of the syntax of <META http-equiv="content-language" content="*">

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9424


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|REOPENED                    |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX




--- Comment #6 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2010-04-14 03:18:51 ---
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale:

So you're saying that you want the spec to allow syntax which is intended to
not do anything, because it does something in some legacy browsers?

Surely if it does something _useful_ in legacy browsers, which can't be done in
some other way, we would want to make future browsers do it too. On the other
hand, if what it does in legacy browsers isn't useful or can be done in another
way, then there's no reason to do it in legacy browsers. Either way, it seems
like the logical conclusion is that there's no point having the conformance
requirements for authors allow something that is a superset of what user agents
are going to support.

Or to put it another way:

Given that you've said that the proposed syntax does nothing in new browsers,
the options are:

1. Proposed syntax does something useful in legacy browsers, but does not in
new browsers, and there's no better solution: we should change what the spec
requires of new browsers, then change the authoring requirements to match what
syntax does something useful in new browsers.

2. Proposed syntax does something useful in legacy browsers, but does not in
new browsers, and there's a better solution: it shouldn't be conforming as it
is a waste of time (it doesn't work in new browsers).

3. Proposed syntax does something that is not useful in legacy browsers, and
does nothing in new browsers: it shouldn't be conforming as it is a waste of
time (it's not useful).

As far as I can tell, the content-language pragma does nothing you can't do
with lang="", and so case #1 doesn't apply. Therefore one of #2 or #3 applies,
and we shouldn't make it conforming.

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Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2010 03:18:54 UTC