Re: Conformance requirements on browsers

2013-09-11 17:44, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 9/11/13 7:17 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> But now I started wondering what is e.g. the status of the (widely
>> supported) @background attribute in <td>. It is just mentioned in 11.2,
>> in a long list of obsolete attributes, with the note "Use CSS instead."
>
> It's also mentioned in 10.3.9:

Thanks. It indeed describes the effect of the attribute. I wonder if it 
is intentional that 11.2 does not refer to the description (in this or 
similar cases).

My question still applies to constructs that are only mentioned (and 
declared obsolete). At least <bgsound> is among them. Subsection 11.2 
says just “Use audio instead”, and it is mentioned in parsing rules 
(must be parsed as empty element), and it must use HTMLUnknownElement. 
So a little more than just mentioned, but with no description of the 
meaning or effect of the element, though ”Use audio instead” implicitly 
says that it’s about sound.

Does this mean that browsers are required to parse <bgsound> as an empty 
element and treat it as an HTMLUnknownElement object (which means just 
that in scripting you can detect it as HTMLUnknownElement but otherwise 
it’s HTMLElemen, right?) but can then do whatever they want with it? Or 
shall they otherwise ignore it? Is IE non-conforming because it keeps 
supporting <bgsound>?

We have an interesting company in 11.3.4: “The |blink 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#blink>|, |bgsound 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#bgsound>|, |isindex 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#isindex-0>|, |multicol 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#multicol>|, |nextid 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#nextid>|, |rb 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#rb>|, and |spacer 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/obsolete.html#spacer>| elements must use the 
|HTMLUnknownElement 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/dom.html#htmlunknownelement>| interface.” Is 
this meant to say something more than it formally says? Does it mean 
that support to these should be dropped? Currently <blink> is not 
supported by newest versions of any browser (though support still exists 
in relatively new versions), <bgsound> is now IE-only but still 
supported in IE 10, <isindex> is widely supported (though little used), 
<multicol> died with Netscape, <nextid> never had any browser support, 
<rb> is redundant, and <spacer> has probably been dead about a decade.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 12 September 2013 06:37:10 UTC