- From: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:40:07 -0500
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- CC: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Ian Hickson wrote: > > (Have no versions: CSS, all the DOM APIs, JS, URI, IRI, Unicode, MIME; > have versions that have no effect: SVG, HTML, MathML, XML; have versions > that have limited effect: HTTP. I'm not familiar enough with the GIF, PNG, > and JPEG formats to comment on them.) RSS is an example of a family of formats[1] that has a version attribute that isn't even treated like a hint by most consumers. RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 barely even share common element names. Yet people commonly copy and paste between them blithely unaware of the differences. Some of the differences are fundamental: description is plain text in RSS 1.0, in RSS 2.0 per the spec it may be plain text or it may be entity encoded HTML with no way to distinguish in between. No matter what the spec may say, effectively today all descriptions are uniformly treated as entity encoded HTML by virtually all producers and consumers. Even in RSS 1.0. Ian provides two RSS 1.0 feeds[2]: one that follows the spec, and one that is actually useful. I maintain the Feed Validator and I don't even bother to police the plain text-ness of description in RSS 1.0. This problem is way worse with title, there the specs and consumers (mostly) agree that it is plain text, yet the producers (mostly) agree that it is entity encoded HTML. That's why you might see things like AT&T in headlines. The only way forward in situations like this is to start over with a new format. People will never stop using RSS, but people who have a need for the problems that Atom fixes will migrate. And consumers will support both. Someday the same will happen to HTML. And you know, I'm quite OK with that. If XHTML2 were an entirely new format that addressed some of the same problems as HTML but in a new, and to some better, way... well then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. Meanwhile, we need to face a reality that all browser vendors but one expressedly do now want to implement any more modes than they already have. The one that has expressed an interest in doing so seems content for now to have that be vendor specific. After first going a different way, they now agree that the default should be standards mode. And are even considering -- I kid you not -- to make the URI itself effectively be the version identifier (search for "Compatibility View list updates" in [3]). At the present time, it is in both producers and consumers best interest to ignore the plain-textness of descriptions in 1.0. For us to have a meaningful and productive discussion on this topic in the context of HTML, we need to find an approach that makes it in the browser's best interest to actually follow the standard. - Sam Ruby [1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss [2] http://ln.hixie.ch/rss/ [3] http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/02/16/just-the-facts-recap-of-compatibility-view.aspx
Received on Thursday, 19 February 2009 11:40:21 UTC