Re: <keygen> element

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Adrian Bateman<adrianba@microsoft.com> wrote:
> On Monday, September 07, 2009 5:59 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Maciej Stachowiak<mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>> > What marking it obsolete would do is result in a conformance error on
>> > every page using it - this seems orthogonal to Microsoft's concern,
>> > and at least to me it seems unhelpful. But perhaps you have some
>> > different concerns that would be addressed by making keygen obsolete.
>>
>> My thinking was that marking it obsolete or deprecated would give
>> microsoft a pretty good story to their customers for not implementing it.
>>
>> However marking it optional would be even more explicit so that seems
>> good to me.
>
> I don't think obsolete or deprecated yet still required really helps us. Our
> goal is a spec that helps us all be interoperable. Optional would be a
> possibility but I worry about complicating this spec with features of a
> different status. I'd personally prefer the spec to stick to things that
> are requirements (even if obsolete) for all user agents.
>
> On Monday, September 07, 2009 5:26 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> It seems to me that the least damaging solution to avoiding requiring
>> things that a vendor has vetoed would be keeping <keygen> conforming and
>> in the HTML5 spec but making implementing it optional in the sense that
>> it must parse the same way in all UAs but whether it on layers above the
>> parser acts as HTMLKeygenElement or as HTMLUnknownElement is up to the
>> implementation.
>
> I'm not sure being in the spec or defined elsewhere affects this since all
> unknown elements should parse in the same way in a conforming UA.

If even optional isn't good enough, then I'm confused as to what
action you're proposing.

I do think that it's important that pages that do want to use <keygen>
in browsers that *do* support it, can still continue to do so. So that
they can use <keygen> in those browsers while using other methods in
IE. For this to work it still requires that all browsers parse
<keygen> the same.

/ Jonas

Received on Tuesday, 8 September 2009 23:07:56 UTC