Re: Support Existing Content (was: Proposed Design Principles review)

At 04:09 PM 4/28/2007 -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>I agree the POV seems off. However, this principle has very important
>implications for language design. How about like this:
>
>Support Existing Content
>
>SupportExistingContent: HTML5 should be designed so that user agents
>conforming to it can still handle existing web content as intended.
>In particular HTML5 should make it possible to process web documents
>and applications via an HTML5 implementation even if they were
>authored against older implementations and do not specifically
>request HTML5 processing.
>
>All changes and additions could cause some content to malfunction at
>least in theory, but this will vary in degree. We need to judge
>whether the value of the change is worth the cost. Cross-browser
>content on the public Web should be given the most weight.

I would feel better about this as a design principle if you used the words
that I sent you, or you wrote words that related HTML 5 to extant HTML
and left the implications as an exercise for the browser designer.

I think that the meaning of this principle should boil down to "We are not
going to change the spelling of "align" or "p" or any other language element
that have come to be expected in desktop UAs, the web, or intranets worldwide."

Am I missing something?

P.S. I am totally in support of defining a set of "Browser Design Principles"
I think that the world would be a better place if you guys could agree on 
those.
I would prefer that browser and language design principles not become confused.

Received on Sunday, 29 April 2007 14:50:53 UTC