- From: Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>
- Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:41:29 -0400
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- CC: public-html@w3.org
Henri Sivonen wrote: > Why would designed-for-ie-version='7' be better than e.g. tested-with- > current-browser-versions-on='2007-04-16'? Because: 1) No one will remember what date the browser with the bug came out on. 2) The date is meaningless if you don't know what browser it applies to. If a page depends on a bug in IE7, the date won't tell you that. 3) Because the date is meaningless outside the context of a browser, Internet Explorer will be assumed and the attribute ends up being a really poor way of saying "designed-for-ie-version='7.0'". As a result of all of the above, we need an attribute that describes the browser and the version rather than a point in time. Perhaps something like this: | <html bugmode="IE7"> [...] </html> When IE8 comes out and some pages break, Microsoft tells everyone they can fix it by just adding the |bugmode| attribute. In fact, they can do so preemptively. It's not ideal, but doing the opposite and assuming bugs unless a switch is used has two serious problems: 1) There's no explicit information indicating that the page depends on any bugs. 2) Standards-compliant pages that are conforming before a switch is introduced will suddenly break because they don't account for the bugs introduced after the specification they comply with.
Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2007 02:39:44 UTC