Re: Choosing name for XML serialization (Was: Re: HTML5 differences from HTML4 editor's draft (XHTML5 and XHTML2))

On 6/25/07, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Jun 2007, Jeff Schiller wrote:
> >
> > I have a question about using the new semantic elements like <section>,
> > <article>, <aside>, etc in a backwards-compatible way.  Is there an
> > appropriate way to use them such that they HTML4- user agents can render
> > them but I can take advantage of any default rendering a HTML5+ user
> > agent will have?
> >
> > Let's say I have:
> >
> > <!DOCTYPE html>
> > <html><body>
> >  <section>
> >    <h1>This Is A HTML5 Document</h1>
> >    <p>It is really keen.</p>
> >    <aside>You don't hear "keen" alot these days, do you?</aside>
> >    <p>But not too many UAs support it yet.</p>
> >  </section>
> > </body></html>
> >
> > All browsers at the moment will render the contents of the <aside>
> > element as default styling of a paragraph, I guess.
>
> Actually IE won't even do that, sadly (IE treats all unknown element start
> and end tags as empty elements). In Mozilla, the above works for elements
> that only contain inline content (so it'd work for the <aside> but not the
> <section>). In Safari and Opera it works fine.

Actually, things seemed to work for me in both IE6 and Mozilla.  The
only thing that did not work was when I added the aside's style - IE
refused to style it properly (but still displayed its contents).  I
haven't tried IE7, but maybe that's what you're referring to - and
that sucks...

> It's actually likely that we won't introduce default styling for many of
> these elements, for exactly this reason.

Ian, who is the "we" in this sentence.  Surely the default styling
would be up to the browser vendors and not the specification
writers...

Thanks,
Jeff

Received on Monday, 25 June 2007 23:38:09 UTC