- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>
- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:00:50 -0500
- To: Matt Dockerty <matt@nistrum.co.uk>
- CC: Master Br <master@sitesbr.net>, www-dom@w3.org
Matt Dockerty wrote:
> I agree that the specification leaves too much room for maneuverability.
It's not quite that simple.
I realize the discussion in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26179
is very long, so here is a summary:
1) IE/Windows clearly doesn't have the DOM as the underlying data structure.
This becomes obvious because the styling of a node changes what its
firstChild node is, for example, which is very much not the way CSS and the
DOM are supposed to interact.
2) Independently of this the HTML spec specifies all sorts of behavior wrt
whitespace that's only half-implemented by various UAs. It's hard to tell
exactly what IE implements here due to item #1.
3) Some UAs (for example Opera) do something to have IE compat in some cases.
I'm not sure what the details of that are.
4) The DOM allows XML parsers to drop whitespace in certain cases, as I
understand. But there were so many stakeholders in the DOM spec that only
someone who was there could say why those parts are there.
> Why is whitespace an optional part of a DOM tree
In which cases? HTML or XML? And with what sort of parser and what sort of
parser flags? ;)
As for browser compat, there's no way for a browser that claims CSS compliance
to have IE compat, due to item 1 above. So the real question is what compat
should be with.
-Boris
Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2006 15:02:05 UTC