[Bug 12513] add specification for <meta name="viewport" ...>

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12513

--- Comment #4 from Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org> 2011-04-18 04:03:44 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> IMHO it would be very unfortunate if this terrible design was immortalized in
> the HTML5 spec.
> 
> <meta viewport> prevents serving same markup to all clients - layout changes
> can't be done with media queries and stylesheets alone.

To be clear, I don't personally like meta viewport either. I'm just trying to
help figure out what (if anything) we should do for it as far as the HTML5 spec
goes.

> Hopefully it's still used only by small fraction of the web, mostly pages that
> were intended to be webkit-only and served to clients with "iP*" in their
> user-agent string.

Whatever the original intent of the creators of the pages wast, I think meta
viewport is now implemented in Fennec and Opera and mobile IE6 (and probably in
mobile IE9 also). Whatever small fraction of the Web it may be used on now, the
trend seems to be that use of it is going to increase, not decrease.

> If anything, I'd prefer HTML5 spec to make <meta name=viewport> non-conforming
> and defer to the @viewport spec.

I guess another option (rather than mentioning it at all in the HTML5 spec) is
to get it registered (status=Accepted) on the WHATWG Wiki MetaExtensions page.
Which I think is what will happen if/when the "CSS Device Adaptation" spec ever
actually gets published by the CSS working group and then proceeds to CR.

But if really do want to discourage use of meta viewport, it should be listed
in the "Non-conforming features" section of the spec:

  http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/obsolete.html#non-conforming-features

For one thing, that would be a signal to developers of conformance checkers of
what their apps should report for documents containing meta viewport (e.g.,
emit an error message saying, "The 'viewport' value for the 'name' attribute on
the meta element is obsolete; use CSS with a @viewport rule instead." (or
whatever).

> AFAIK behaviors of <meta name=viewport> map closely to properties in @viewport,
> so the latter spec could be the place where <meta name=viewport> is documented
> (if that is really required).

I see now that it is documented in the "Viewport META element" section of the
"CSS Device Adaptation" draft - http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-device-adapt/

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Received on Monday, 18 April 2011 04:03:46 UTC