Re: Counter change-proposal for ISSUE-4 (html-versioning)

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Adam Barth <w3c@adambarth.com> wrote:
> The primary remaining rationale for having a version indicator is that
> we might find such a version indicator useful in the future (even
> though we agree that this eventuality is unlikely).

I don't understand this rationale.  Suppose we decide we want HTML6 to
be backward-incompatible -- i.e., to allow authors to create documents
that legacy UAs will simply reject, rather than processing them
incorrectly.  Why can't we just make up something then to achieve
that?  For instance, use a different file extension and MIME type.  Or
require that the first four characters be "<!--", and that HTML6 UAs
ignore any content before the first "<!--", so anything prior can be
used as fallback.

It seems like an explicit version indicator now would give only slight
benefit over the status quo, even *if* breaking compatibility were
ever necessary (which seems extremely unlikely).  We should make sure
that we'd be able to deal with extremely unlikely future scenarios,
but we don't have to be able to do so elegantly.

Received on Sunday, 21 February 2010 22:08:18 UTC