- From: Craig Francis <craig@synergycms.com>
- Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:18:40 +0100
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>, Stephen Stewart <beowulf@carisenda.com>, "Philip Taylor (Webmaster)" <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>, HTML Working Group <public-html@w3.org>
On 21 Jun 2007, at 23:22, Ian Hickson wrote: > Versioned implementations also increases the implementationa and > testing > cost of writing a Web browser, which reduces the likelihood that a > browser > will be fully compliant. Given how hard it is to get browsers to be > compliant in the first place, we want to reduce any barrier to that > goal. Adding a version does not necessarily mean that a browser needs to look at that information... but it does mean that information is there if required (for what ever reason I cannot think of at the moment). Personally, I am taking the view that HTML should be parsed by the browser as HTML, irrispective of version... its up to them if they want to act on the version number... the real benefit of the version though is for the author to claim compliance with a specification (not one which may or may not exist in the future... like HTML-100). Given your example of the <credit> tag, where the meaning was to change from a money value to the name of the author... well I should hope that this will never happen, as it would show huge incompetentcy on the part of those writing the specification. A better example is perhaps over the table @summary attribute... currently writing for HTML4, this is perfectly valid, and even encouraged... but at the moment, HTML5 will not include this attribute... does that mean that all tables (with tabular data) that use the @summary attribute, are now invalid... even though they are written in HTML4? How about we just go with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" theory, and keep the version number... the browser does not need to use it (not that they do at the moment) but it is additional information which can be useful for some user agents (validators?). Craig
Received on Saturday, 23 June 2007 13:20:45 UTC