Re: Versioning and the end user

On Mon, April 16, 2007 7:30 pm, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>> The usual way to be
>> this is via a version identifier (i.e. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC
>> "-//W3C//DTD HTML 5.0//EN">).
>
> As pointed out, that has relevance to the document content, not to the UAs
> rendering the content.  In other words, you can't use a single identifier
> to reasonably opt in for multiple UAs, each of which has several releases.

To be honest, I'm not sure why so many people are opposed to perpetuating
the standard DOCTYPE, with slight changes to remove the references to DTD.
 So it's not SGML.  Who cares?  Like it or not, DOCTYPEs are associated
with both HTML and XHTML now.  Why not:

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

Is that really such a bad thing?  Schedule planned updates to the spec so
that the next update isn't HTML 6.0 10 years down the road, but HTML 5.01,
5.02, etc. in smaller, front-loaded intervals (e.g., 5.01 one year from
now, 5.02 two years after that, 5.03 three years after that).  Or 5.1,
5.2, etc. if necessary.

The amount of time doesn't matter; the point is that the spec is updated
so those that want to use DOCTYPE switching can do so without an extra
attribute on <html> or goofy comment-based mechanisms.  Those who don't
want to do so--don't.

Otherwise, it really is looking like it will take 10 years to finish this
spec at this rate.

-Matt

Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2007 17:57:42 UTC