- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:19:08 -0800
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
> I have never heard any browser vendor talk about any of these modes in a > positive light, only ever as a necessary evil, and often with regret. > Adding mode modes should be on our list of things to avoid wherever > possible. I'm not arguing for adding more modes. I'm discussing whether there is to be a standard way of indicating which mode is intended or desired. I agree that in some circumstances, allowing someone to say something about the mode intended can have unintended side effects which also have to be mitigated, but the possibility of those side effects isn't sufficient justification for avoiding having a standard method. > Then my original e-mail on this thread is relevant in that it shows that > we only have two possible axes for versioning, namely the namespace and > the tag name for whatever elements we want to version. Well, no, those aren't the only two *possible* axes, those are the two that you may prefer. DOCTYPE, version attributes and other mechanisms are also *possible* axes, and no version mechanism by itself may be sufficient. > Versioning in general is bad idea IMHO, as discussed almost two years ago: > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2007Jun/0024.html Version designations inside web document formats when there are multiple versions is a fundamental distributed network design, certainly over 30 years old. The earliest discussion I can readily find related to the web is only 16 years old, though. See: http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/archives/WWW-TALK/www-talk-1992.messages/216.html The principles of versioning discussed then have been underlying all MIME registrations and format discussions in the intervening years. Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Thursday, 19 February 2009 01:19:53 UTC