- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 23:49:02 -0800
- To: "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On Tuesday 2009-12-01 00:00 -0800, Larry Masinter wrote:
> * Except for explicitly defined previous versions of DOCTYPE
> strings used to trigger "quirks mode" (see [#quirks-mode] and
> [hsvonin]), implementations which consume HTML SHOULD NOT use the
> DOCTYPE to trigger alternative behavior, as authors tend to use
> DOCTYPE versions inconsistent with expected behavior.
This part of the proposal makes me uncomfortable, because it assigns
one particular rationale ("as authors tend to use ...") to a SHOULD
NOT statement that I think there are much stronger arguments for. A
one-phrase summary of the particular rationale I care about is "as it
vastly increases reverse-engineering costs for other implementations
that seek to be compatible with that implementation". I described
this in more detail in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0279.html and
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2009Aug/0054.html .
(My general thoughts on the proposal tend to agree with
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Dec/0015.html (Tab) and
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Dec/0022.html (Lachlan).)
-David
--
L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation http://www.mozilla.com/
Received on Friday, 4 December 2009 07:49:31 UTC