Re: ISSUE-55: Re-enable @profile in HTML5 (draft 1)

On Oct 9, 2009, at 9:31 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

>
> 1) head@profile is a feature inherited from HTML4, and external  
> standards relied on it in good faith. But html@version has never  
> been been in any version of HTML, so no one has had any valid reason  
> to depend on it.

As pointed out by Anne van Kesteren, I overstated my case.

HTML 4.01 allowed a version attribute on <html>, but did not define  
the syntax and made it deprecated. It is only allowed in the loose  
DTD, not strict.
HTML 3.2 had a version attribute, did not specify it at all in prose,  
and the DTD made it fixed to the value "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN".
HTML 3.0 had a version attribute, and in prose and the DTD made it  
fixed to the value "-//W3O//DTD W3 HTML 3.0//EN".

I don't believe the version attribute is used to any significant  
extent in existing Web content.

Given this history, I think the newly proposed version attribute is  
effectively a brand new feature, even though HTML has had an attribute  
named "version" in the past.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Saturday, 10 October 2009 11:05:01 UTC