- From: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>
- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:14:34 +0200
- To: public-html@w3.org
At 08:30 -0500 UTC, on 2007-04-26, Jeff Schiller wrote: > In the "bugmode" thread, Lachlan stated that > > "I will draw the line at requiring authors to use non-conforming > attributes just to get the latest standards mode. As a web developer, > I certainly do not want to forced to use such an opt-in." [1] > > But, Microsoft has taken the hard line that an opt-in WILL be required > in IE.next regardless of what web developers think they want. Note that Chris Wilson in <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/1233.html> specifically said he wants IE to use a "proprietary, non-invalidating opt-in switch". I assume that with "non-invalidating" he means "conforming" and I assume he means that the switch will be in a HTML comment. (But it would be nice if we wouldn't have to assume.) So the "non-invalidating" part at least is somewhat positive[*]. But there is the real issue that a proprietary opt-in switch requires authors to rely on some other source than the HTML spec, and that conformance checkers by definition cannot check the conformity of a proprietary switch. To me, that's a show stopper. Authors will want to publish conforming documents that are treated as such. Authors who are not specialists should be able to use an authoring tool and rely on a built-in conformance checker. A proprietary switch makes that impossible. [*] Although, assuming I understood Henri Sivonen correctly, a switch hidden in comments can still be a problem for authors piping content through non-HTML tools. I don't know enough about this to judge it properly, but it seems that even this "non-invalidating" approach would still be a problem for authoring tools. [...] > The question seems to be whether the opt-in should be spec-mandated or > something proprietary. My proposal is that this should be defined by > the specification Indeed. [...] > Here are some of the use cases in the above scenario: > > Content Type A) Pages served without the DOCTYPE: > - will continue to be considered "quirks mode" into the future by all >browsers As I understand it, the WHATWG only introduced a doctype to provide IE with a switch. (HTML 5 isn't SGML, so no doctype required.) So I got the impression that the aim at least /was/ to treat doctype-less HTML documents as HTML 5. Given that WHATWG's HTML 5 defines how UAs are to treat what today we call "invalid markup", in that scenario there is no such thing as quirks/standards mode. There is only HTML (5 and up). Unless I misunderstood this, therefore the only quirks/standards modes we are discussing is IE.next's. All other UAs will treat all HTML documents as HTML 5. (Well, unless the HTML WG decides to assign more value to a doctype.) -- Sander Tekelenburg The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>
Received on Thursday, 26 April 2007 16:17:03 UTC