Re: Conformance requirements on browsers

On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:11:21 +0200, Charles McCathie Nevile  
<chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:

> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:29:12 +0400, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 10:57:05 +0200, Jukka K. Korpela
>
>>> It sounds illogical that a browser is not allowed to support <bgsound>  
>>> but is allowed to support <backgroundsound>.
>>
>> So a bit more context:
> [...]
>> So new elements should not be created, you're right that that means  
>> that there can exist situations in which it is conforming for a UA to  
>> do so anyway. The other requirement is that such extensions should be  
>> named as "x-vendor-feature", but again there can exist situations in  
>> which it is conforming for a UA to use a different naming.
>>
>> This suggests that both "bgsound" and "backgroundsound" *could* be  
>> vendor-specific extensions, and can be conforming if the UA vendor has  
>> valid reasons and has carefully considered the implications before  
>> implementing it. However, if a particular browser has just kept an old  
>> element around since the dawn of time (or at least since before this  
>> requirement existed in the spec), it's hard to argue that they comply  
>> with these "should" and "should not".
>
> What's wrong with "there is content using this, so we support it for  
> backward compatibility" as an argument?

That can be a valid argument, but, if it is required for compat, its  
behavior should be in the spec. In the case of <bgsound>, Gecko and WebKit  
never found it being big enough compat loss not to support it, and Presto  
even intentionally dropped support.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Saturday, 14 September 2013 18:13:25 UTC