Re: Versioning and html[5]

On Apr 12, 2007, at 19:40, Chris Wilson wrote:

> I promised I would write up the picture of how we view  
> compatibility at Microsoft.

Thank you. It helps understand the IE team point of view. However,  
even if we take as granted that IE needs opt-in versioning, there's  
no guarantee that the opt-in flags for future IE versions will match  
the publication of future HTML spec versions.

> As for the details of version, I have to object strongly to the  
> idea that the DOCTYPE for HTML5 should just be:
>
> <!DOCTYPE html>
>
> Because I think we would eventually realize we'd broken something,  
> and then we'd re-introduce version numbers

It may turn out that HTML6 will work without a different version  
identifier. It may turn out that HTML6 needs to reintroduce an  
explicit version number. Either way, HTML5 would be fine with <! 
DOCTYPE html>.

I don't think HTML5 needs to have an explicit number there in order  
to avoid re-introducing explicit numbers in case the scenario of  
HTML6 requiring a version identifier is realized in the future. It is  
up to HTML6 to provide a flag to be different if one is really needed  
in the future. In that scenario, re-introducing a version number will  
be a smaller problem than the changes requiring explicit versioning.  
On the other hand, if the scenario of HTML6 not requiring a different  
version id is realized, <!DOCTYPE html> is more elegant for both  
HTML5 and HTML6.

> In short, I'm not that positive that HTML 5 will be the time we get  
> it right for all time.  I would suggest that we use
>
> <!DOCTYPE html5>

That particular doctype won't work, because it triggers the quirks  
mode in Gecko and WebKit.

Test case:
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/test-quirks.php?doctype=%3C%21DOCTYPE 
+html5%3E

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2007 17:44:33 UTC