- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:34:50 +0100
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Cc: "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Larry Masinter wrote: > The form of the doctype header is > > <!DOCTYPE html> > or<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "html version string"> > or<!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "about:legacy-compat"> > ... > > The form with a "html version string" SHOULD NOT be used unless the > content is served in a controlled environment where the intended version > is known. There is still a very big chance that such DOCTYPEs will inevitably leak out onto the public web anyway, where they are unwanted and completely useless. > The html version string is allowed primarily because it may be > useful for content management systems and other development workflows as > a kind of metadata to indicate which specification was being consulted > when the HTML content was being prepared. The DOCTYPE is not intended for general purpose metadata. Given that you're talking about controlled environments, there's nothing stopping such sytems utilising other mechanisms intended providing metadata, like <meta> as was suggested earlier. Such metadata would not need to be officially documented in the spec, as there wouldn't need to be interoperability with systems outside of such a controlled environment. Although, I've not seen any evidence that there are any such systems that utilise versioning metadata like this. Are you aware of any real world CMSs today that do anything particularly useful with the versioning informaton, and if so, what, and why is it a good design pattern that should be endorsed by the spec in any way? -- Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software http://lachy.id.au/ http://www.opera.com/
Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 16:35:22 UTC