Re: HDP: Revised "Support Existing Content" Principle

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sep 22, 2007, at 8:12 PM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> 
>> At 12:50 +0300 UTC, on 2007-09-22, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>
>>> [...] HTML5 does *not* aim to be backwards compatible with HTML 4 (as 
>>> HTML
>>> 4 is specified).
>>>
>>> The aim to make HTML5 UAs compatible with existing
>>> Web content and to make conforming HTML5 documents degrade with some
>>> grace in notable existing browsers.
>>
>> That's yet another Principle :) But you're right, I should have said
>> something like "HTML5 aims to be as backwards compatible with 
>> pre-HTML5 UAs
>> as possible".
>>
>> Then again, the first sentence if this Principle says "This principle 
>> applies
>> primarily to the conforming *language*." [emphasis mine]
> 
> If you really wanted to be precise in a single sencence:
> 
> "HTML5 Should Try to Make it Possible, Preferably Easy, for Conforming 
> HTML5 Content to Behave Reasonably in Notable Pre-HTML5 HTML User Agents".
> 
> But that's way too long. Support Existing Content could similarly be 
> renamed to:
> 
> "HTML5 Should Ensure That Conforming HTML5 Implementations Process 
> Significant Pre-HTML5 HTML Content as Intended".
> 
> Perhaps I should include these as topic sentences, even though they are 
> too long to be names for principles.
> 

Definitely, note the point. The standard seems to be annotated in other places 
with ideas that have not been quite articulated yet.

A couple of other points/angles that should perhaps also be noted (which may 
have got lost in rewrites) are:

a)That user agents should perhaps support multiple versions of HTML eg HTML3.2 
compliant, XHTML...
b)The scope/position/relationship of HTMLto other standards eg - SMIL, XML...

Here extensibility (if there is such a word) rather than incorporation may be 
more useful.

 From a conversation, there seemed to have once been an idea/objective that 
HTML5 was to enable more interaction. An example of incoporaating commonly used 
functionality currently provided by scripts would be menus or even a form 
submission. This may require a linguistic shift - which would make backward 
compatibility impossible.

Marghanita

> Regards,
> Maciej
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://www.ramin.com.au
Phone: (+61)0414 869202

Received on Sunday, 23 September 2007 22:48:19 UTC