Re: Null change proposal for ISSUE-88 (mark II): proposed note

Maciej Stachowiak, Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:18:59 -0700:
> On Apr 9, 2010, at 1:08 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> On 08.04.2010 22:37, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> ...
>>> That does make sense. Would it be acceptable then to just make the pragma
>>> non-conforming, thus removing any valid syntax at all?
>>> ...
>> 
>> Nope.
>> 
>> The syntax of the value isn't controlled by HTML.
>> 
>> It's ok to add warnings and recommendations about what better 
>> alternatives are there.
> 
> What Ian suggests would not affect the syntax of the value at all. 
  [...]
> Note: I'm not rendering an opinion on whether dropping 
> Content-Language as conforming is a good idea or not. I'm jut trying 
> to explain the actual effect of Ian's proposed change, as I 
> understand it.

It is one thing to remove @profile - it hardly affects anyone. Yet 
still, Ian did not accept not to mention it until he heard that Mozilla 
would eventually be removing their support of it.

But when it comes to META content-language, then user agents reacts to 
it, regardless. And some, Gecko browsers and IE8, also reacts to the 
HTTP header, in the same way that they react to the META declaration.

Making it unconforming, is to remove authors’ ability work around the 
various issues that are connected with content-language. We all become 
subject to improvements of the user agents. It also removes the 
advantage that Mozilla today has over other UAs: As long as one can use 
META content-language to cancel the effect of HTTP, then no other UA 
supports lang=""/xml:lang="" is more in accordance with HTML5 than 
Gecko.

My proposal, to make only the empty string the valid value, is a better 
method for "removing any valid syntax".
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Friday, 9 April 2010 09:08:12 UTC