Re: Simple! Just say True or False.

On Wed, 6 May 1998, Sathish Kumar Rangarajan wrote:

> 		1.	Backward-compatibility

The property of a technology where an implementation of said technology is
compatible with previous versions. For instance, if an HTML 4.0 document is
compatible with an HTML 3.2 user agent. This is not *technically* true of
HTML, but since the proposed fallback for unknown tags is to ignore them, it
is mostly true. It is true of CSS, if I'm not mistaken; a CSS2 stylesheet
can be processed by a CSS1 parser, it's just that not all of the
functionality will be there.

> 		2.	I don't understand what this non-CSS
> 			*compliant* and non-CSS *supporting*
> 			funda is. Could you give me exmpls.

I was referring to the difference between implementing something badly and
not implementing it all.

The difference is that, for instance, if a browser *ignores* the CSS
directive

{ border: solid thin red; }

That's OK, really. It's just that any element with that directive attached
to it won't have a red border around it, it's no big loss. If, however, a
browser sees the above directive and, for instance, decides that it should
inherit to all of the element's children, then you'd have the paragraph AND
the children with a red border. If (to take a real world example, from
Netscape Navigator 4.0) the border is drawn around the element but not the
background, and you have to use a negative padding to make it look like you
want it to, it's a bad thing.

-- Stephanos Piperoglou -- sp249@cam.ac.uk -------------------
All tribal myths are true, for a given value of `true'.
                         - Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
------------------------- http://www.thor.cam.ac.uk/~sp249/ --

Received on Thursday, 7 May 1998 09:30:03 UTC