Re: Support Existing Content

I find it funny that technically advanced individuals in this very 
mailing list break up our nice threads again and again. What do you 
think, Gareth, should the server just have rejected your mail?

See, people aren't perfect, especially those who author HTML. User 
Agents will have to accept ill-formed mark-up. Advanced authors who 
want/need strictness and/or extensibility can chose the XHTML derivative 
(by that I don't mean XHTML2).

--Dao

Gareth Hay schrieb:
> 
>>
>> James Graham wrote:
>>
>>> What gives you the idea that all content with <!DOCTYPE HTML> (or 
>>> whatever) at the top will be "well formed"
>>
>> It won't (until pigs learn to fly); what I am arguing is that
>> for HTML5+, browsers should refuse to render non-well-formed
>> documents.  All extant (HTML 4.01-) documents would continue
>> to be renderable and rendered for the foreseeable future, but
>> w.e.f. HTML5, non-well-formed HTML5+ documents would never be
>> seen by the end user,
>>
> 
>>
>> To jeopardise this opportunity by insisting that the
>> browser use the same parsing/rendering algorithms for legacy
>> ("tag soup") documents as for new ("well formed") documents
>> is insane, IMHO.
>>
>> Philip Taylor
>>
> 
> I think this is 100% spot on, and far more nicely said than my previous 
> attempts.
> 
> I tried to raise the point that UA's can use what they have now to 
> render backward content, while striving for something better with HTML5, 
> I wholeheartedly agree with Philip's comments.
> 
> At the very least this forces authors to better understand what they are 
> doing. Yes, some will just always stick in tag soup mode because it's 
> what they know and it works for them, the point is they will do that 
> *anyway*.
> We can use HTML5 to progress the web in a way that will provide better 
> cleaner code and a more consistent experience IMO.
> 
> Gareth

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 14:55:00 UTC