Re: Re-registration of text/html

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> The problem that I see is that HTML5 defines a parser and that the
> current version of the HTML5 spec draft says that the HTML5 parser
> should ignore the @profile attribute.

Not quite.  There's nothing in the parser about it at all.  User
agents should ignore it, but that just means they shouldn't do
anything special with it (and the spec specifies precisely *how* they
should ignore it).  In base HTML, @profile is just treated like any
other unknown attribute; it's preserved in the DOM but has no effect.

> There quite a few similar issues. E.g. HTML4 supports image maps were
> one uses <a> instead of <area> - HTML5 does not have this feature
> (currently) - and I heard from Boris and Anne that they would be so
> happy to remove that feature from their respective browsers. @summary,
> @longdesc etc belongs to the same set of issues.
>
> So the concrete problem is the parser - that HTML5 blesses removal of
> features that are important to handle HTML4 documents.

The whole reason we remove these sorts of things is because they
*aren't* important for HTML4 documents.  When something is undesirable
and only an insignificant number of pages use it, it's fairly safe to
remove.  If a significant number of pages depended on it, it would be
useless to remove it from the spec, as browsers would still have to
implement it to handle existing content.

>> Do you believe in ever obsoleting specs? Does your concern about
>> HTML4 extend to HTML 2.0? If not, why not?
>
> Except for the very doctypes themselves of those specs, are there
> things in HTML32 and HTML2 that did not make it to HTML4?

Yes.  For example, just looking at the list of specified elements, you
can see that <xmp> and <listing> were present in HTML2 but not in
HTML4.01.  There are several more elements that still officially exist
but have no effect, such as <nextid>, such that if any documents *did*
depend on their functionality, they would be broken by a UA
implementing the spec.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 24 February 2010 23:01:47 UTC