- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:42:53 -0800
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- CC: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
I wrote: > The need for multiple libraries comes from having incompatible > languages or language versions. Incompatible languages and > language versions should be avoided--- however, not providing > a way of detecting which of several incompatible languages > or language versions was intended is a head-in-the-sand way > of pretending like they don't exist, and makes the problem > worse, not better. To which Dan responded: > I don't think so; the summary of this issue > http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/4 > shows that there are some eyes-open arguments > that lead to the conclusion that we should not > provide a way of detective which of several > incompatible languages was intended: > * L. David Baron "Version information" - > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0279.html But that argument is > If we add version information, it will be tempting for the > implementation that Web authors are most commonly "writing for" to > use the version information to keep improvements in standards > compliance from applying to existing pages on the Web (i.e., pages > marked as older versions). The temptation to "break the web" in the name of Browser Wars exists whether or not the HTML specification provides a documented versioning mechanism, and an argument of the form "if we don't let them declare a version, then browsers that only support one version won't exist" I think deserves being called "head in the sand": not that those proposing the strategy haven't thought about it, but rather that somehow a browser vendor would be so influenced by not seeing a standard versioning mechanism as to keep them from introducing a non-standard version mechanism (such as what we've already seen with the various 'quirks' modes.) Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 21:44:54 UTC