Re: A Compromise to the Versioning Debate

Henri Sivonen schrieb:
> On Apr 16, 2007, at 11:18, Dão Gottwald wrote:
> 
>> Henri Sivonen schrieb:
>>>> <!DOCTYPE html>
>>>> <!--[mode = IE8]-->
>>>> <html>
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> It doesn't really matter what syntax you use for it.
>>> It sure does. If Microsoft insists on more switches, the sane way is 
>>> to use an attribute on the root element as it survives through 
>>> various XML APIs. I have been involved in hacking a SAX-based tool to 
>>> preserve (against my explicit advice) IE6 quirks modeness in XHTML 
>>> served as text/html. (The XML decl thing.) It was ugly.
>>
>> Why should it survive?
> 
> If it doesn't survive, the tool that zapped it will be blamed for 
> breaking the page.
> 
> Scenario 1 (Good):
>  * Microsoft doesn't insist on IE-specific switches.
>  * The WG doesn't spec version identifiers.
>  * (X)HTML5 gets the standards mode and bug fixes apply.
> 
> Scenario 2 (Bad):
>  * Microsoft insists on switches tied to IE versions.
>  * The WG vehemently objects.
>  * The conformance definition doesn't leave room for an attribute-based 
> switch on the root element.
>  * Microsoft bakes the switch into syntactic sugar to make the switch 
> invisible to conformance checkers.
>  * The switch gets dropped by architecturally sound XML toolchains that 
> do not round-trip syntactic sugar or that drop comments as permitted by 
> the XML spec.
> [...]

I see. But then the name of the attribute should make clear that it's 
IE-specific, and as an interim solution, it shouldn't be part of the 
spec. I think Chris Wilson agreed that they won't need new switches once 
they are close enough to the standards.

--Dao

Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 09:35:00 UTC