Re: Doctype in "HTML: The Markup Language"

Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, 2008-11-16 11:15 +0200:

>  http://www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/#the-doctype
> 
>  The text that is italicized / class=note is more vague than what the HTML 5 
>  draft prescribes about modes.

Yeah, re-reading it, I can see it's maybe not doing well what I
intended it for, which was to just provide context for why a
doctype is required. It wasn't meant to actually (re)define what
the modes are.

>  The HTML 5 draft prescribes exactly three modes of text/html processing. 
>  Documents lacking a doctype are not "most likely" to be processed in the 
>  quirks mode but are processed in it by conforming browsers.

The note was not really meant to describe what the conformant
behavior is with respect to modes, but just to try to give enough
context for a reader of the document who asks, "Why do I need to
put a doctype in my document?"

But one of the stated goals of the document is "to be minimal;
that is, to keep its descriptions as short as necessary to
precisely define the HTML language, without being so short as to
be unclear or ambiguous", and I think the content of the note is
the kind of information that's can be appropriately and adequately
covered in the authoring guide. So I've removed the entire note.

I think for the purposes of this draft at least, the phrase
"...for legacy reasons that have to do with processing modes in
browsers..." is adequate.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/

Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 08:51:06 UTC