Re: Versioning and html[5]

Henri Sivonen schreef:
>> the only solution I can see is to force authors to specify their 
>> opt-in to the bugs and features of a particular UA  using e.g. <meta 
>> name="ua-version" value="IE7"> to specify IE7+ should work in IE7 
>> mode when rendering the document.
>
> I am *not* advocating version-based opt-in to bug fixes, but if the 
> opt-in idea were to be generalized, I think the generalization would 
> not be declaring the HTML version but something like
> <html browser-engine-bugs-as-of='2007-04-12'>.

Sounds like a great idea. One that Chris more or less suggested in his 
mail, quote:

"the BEST thing for us, then, (and now I’m talking about Microsoft AND 
the WG) is to have new DOCTYPE identifiers occur every so often (where 
“every so often” trends to infinity, as implementations get more and 
more compliant)"

But on the version number, I really only see two options:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 5.0//EN">

Or:

<html version="5.0">

Where my preference strongly leans to the latter, as the doctype isn’t 
even in XHTML, the first word in a doctype refers to the root element 
and html5 isn’t the root element, and I’d like to stay as far away from 
doctypes as possible :).

Instead of having 5.0, having a date like version="20070512" or just 
"200705" seems like an even better idea, too, since we don’t want to 
couple the version number to the specification version. Or maybe 
version="5.0.200705".

Now another question: is using HTML version numbers for fixing CSS 
issues the correct thing to do? From what I read (and from what IE6 and 
IE7 fixed), *that* is what it is mostly used for. What happens to XML 
pages that are styled with CSS? They don’t have any kind of version 
information like this.

Then again, I would love if Microsoft could change the default type for 
a <button> to submit instead of button. The idea of specifying behaviour 
where browsers differ to be ‘the best thing to do’ instead of ‘what IE 
does’ is quite appealing to me. These are cases where apparantly 
difference in behaviour was not important enough for non-IE browsers to 
implement ‘what IE does’, so these would be opportinuties for change in 
IE. So I suppose I’m maybe even hesitantly in favour of introducing a 
version number (as shown above).

Another reason why I’m hesitantly in favour is because the alternative 
(browsers creating their own opt-in mechanisms) means that in order for 
a page to be compatible with a certain browser, you have to add a number 
of de-facto attributes (or conditional comments, etc). If there is a 
version number specified in the standard, at least it’s well, specified.


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.

Received on Friday, 13 April 2007 05:30:28 UTC