Re: Rethinking HTML 5 (Was: Re: Semicolon after entities)

On May 1, 2007, at 10:29 AM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) wrote:

> Jeff Cutsinger wrote:
>
>>> And what does it really mean ? That a document
>>> written in HTML5 will display  "correctly" in
>>> browsers that are HTML5-unaware ?
>> Yes.
>
> If the browsers are HTML5-unaware, then their
> behaviour in the presence of (new) HTML5 elements
> is unpredictable to say the least.  The probability
> that such a docment will display "correctly"
> (no matter how you choose to define "correctly")
> is vanishingly small.

HTML4 defines how to handle unknown elements - they should be  
rendered by default as inlines with no specific presentation. This  
means that through careful design, you can define HTML5 features in a  
way that will normally degrade gracefully in HTML4 user agents, or in  
some cases even work identically through the addition of a bit of  
styling and script.

However, allowing HTML5 content to degrade gracefully in HTML4 UAs is  
a separate issue from allowing HTML5 UAs to handle existing HTML4  
content. I think both are important goals.

>> Really, if you're so stuck on this, the WHATWG
>> standard allows you to use XML! Or use XHTML 1.0 or 1.1 with the
>> application/xhtml+xml mimetype. Or try out XHTML 2.0.
>
> No thank you, I want to use HTML5, where HTML5 is derived
> from HTML 4.01 Strict rather than from something that looks
> more like HTML 3.2 as modified by a committee.

If you want draconian error handling and are willing to break  
compatibility with existing content, why is XML not an acceptable  
solution for you?

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 18:39:05 UTC