Re: DOCTYPE versioning change proposal (ISSUE-4)

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