- From: Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:35:50 -0800
----- Original Message ----- From: "J. King" <jking@dark-phantasy.com> To: "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news at terrainformatica.com> Cc: "www-html" <www-html at w3.org> Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 9:22 PM Subject: Re: [whatwg] HTML syntax: shortcuts for 'id' and 'class' attributes > On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:46:13 -0500, Andrew Fedoniouk > <news at terrainformatica.com> wrote: > >> Ian, what does this "backward compatibility" mean? > > I can't speak for what Hixie considers backwards compatible, but I can > tell you why a construct should as that which you're suggesting is not > backwards compatible: A start tag such as <p.myclass> would produce a > "p.myclass" element, not a "p" element as one would want to have. This is > true for every element type, so any document that used this construct in a > majority or (horror of horrors) all of its element start-tags would have a > document cmnposed of elements entirely unknown to an HTML4 UA. This is > unacceptable, especially considering the nominal gain. > So in your interpretation backward compatibility of HTML5 means that HTML5 must be a subset of HTML4. That is not general intention I beleive. I understand motivation to keep HTML5 as close as possible to HTML4 (but not to XHTML?) thus to have reasonable, say, interoperability. Thus I think statement "backward compatibility" needs to be reformulated. At least everybody shall have clear idea of what "backward" means. Andrew.
Received on Thursday, 30 November 2006 21:35:50 UTC