RE: Intent to Conform (was Re: Version information)

Laurens Holst [mailto:lholst@students.cs.uu.nl] wrote:
>Chris Wilson schreef:
>> All,
>>         I need to detail an essay about compatibility and opt-in to
>>explain the Microsoft viewpoint on this.  I have a few things on my
>>plate I must do today, so it will probably take a day or two.  I'm
>>going to likely be silent until then on this topic.
>
>I wonder how much merit it has to discuss/decide this now; isn’t the
>necessity of this depending on the output of this working group and
>the opinion of implementors on the feasibility to implement it without
>breaking current pages?  Assuming on beforehand the spec will never be
>able to define HTML5 in a way that doesn’t break existing pages is I
>think premature.

The current HTML5 spec has severe breakages from IE's implementation already.  (E.g. removing the classid and codebase attributes from <object>.)  This is why I needed to write up my thoughts.

>You mentioned HTML6; if HTML6 is not interoperable without breaking
>backwards compatibility, a version switch can be added in HTML6.
>Saying that HTML5 won’t have versioning information does I think
>not prevent future specifications from not having any.

And saying that the DOCTYPE is <!DOCTYPE html5> rather than <!DOCTYPE html> doesn't say that the next version actually needs to be HTML6, or that it will necessitate a new DOCTYPE version.

>Plus that I (as stated earlier) don’t think that per-specification-
>versioning is very useful, what you would really need is per-user-
>agent versioning.

They are both part of the story.  My essay will go out later this morning.

-Chris

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2007 16:37:42 UTC