Re: Legacy Doctype and Doctype Versioning

Maciej Stachowiak, Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:15:02 -0800:
> On Jan 19, 2010, at 4:43 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> Larry Masinter wrote:

>>> Are there documents that are conforming to HTML 4.01 but are also 
>>> "quirks mode"?

>> Yes.  From the spec, these two trigger quirks mode: [...]
>> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#dfnReturnLink-6
> 
> I suspect most people know this, but just to be clear, the HTML 4.01 
> Strict DTD will *not* trigger quirks mode.

No, Maciej, this is not correct. Anymore.

Not in Safari 4. In the current version of Safari, this variant of the 
strict Doctype triggers QuirksMode:

	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" 
	[<!ATTLIST P myattr CDATA #implied  >]> 

Whereas it does not trigger quirks mode in Opera 10.10, Firefox 3.6, 
Konqueror or IE. I also _suppose_ that in Safari 3, then it did not 
trigger QuirksMode (since it doesn't trigger quirks in Konqueror)

In the just days old Opera 10.5 beta, however, there it _does_ trigger 
quirks mode. (Whereas in Opera 10.10, then it does not.)

Are Webkit and Opera starting to treat anything that hasn't been 
specified to trigger Standards mode in HTML5 as QuirksMode triggers? Is 
this an effect of HTML5 defining QuirksMode as the default?

I remember that Larry in one of his messages suggested that there 
should be an opening for using DOCTYPEs which does not trigger 
QuirksMode. But if vendors are working towards making everything that 
has not so far been mentioned in HTML5 as triggering Quirks, then ... 
as the result of HTML5, there will be more QuirksMode triggers than 
ever! 

Is the intention to simply kill off DTD's as a possible way to perform 
validation? This will also have effect for XHTML doctypes that hasn't 
so far been defined.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 03:06:12 UTC