- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@niksula.hut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 19:17:03 +0300
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Friday, Jun 27, 2003, at 04:02 Europe/Helsinki, Tantek Çelik wrote: > I'm claiming that Mozilla copied the DOCTYPE switch in IE5/Mac because > that's pretty much what I saw happen after IE5/Mac shipped. The > particular > choices that IE5/Mac had made for the most part (which DOCTYPES meant > what, > and what effects happened) seemed to show up in NS6+ after IE5/Mac > shipped > and demonstrated in the market that they worked. > > It didn't surprise me that such reverse-engineering took place. Actually, Eric Meyer had publicly documented the Transitional with system id vs. Transitional without system id behavior before I suggested doing the same in Mozilla. April 2000: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/ index.html?page=2 June 2000: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42525 > I'm surprised when I see subtle differences in fact, like treating > HTML4 > Transitional with URL DOCTYPE as quirky rather than standards > (especially > since the CSS1 Test Suite has used that particular DOCTYPE since its > inception). Not all real-world pages that look OK in the standards mode of Mac IE 5 look good in the standards mode of Mozilla, because Mozilla generates a line box around a lone inline image and align the image to baseline by default. Back in 2000, there were already prominent sites that used the HTML 4.0 Transitional doctype with system id but weren't compatible with Mozilla's standards mode (the line box with image thing). Convincing the Netscape Product Delivery Team to approve standards mode for HTML 4.0 Transitional with system id in the Netscape 6.0 timeframe without convincing the layout folks to be less strict about the line box just would not have worked. As a compromise, standards layout for Transitional was limited to HTML 4.01 with system id (and XHTML). Initially, the exact URL used as the system id mattered, but that was a plain bug. Later, the almost standards mode was introduced in order to be less strict about the line box around a lone image. However, HTML 4.0 with system id was not promoted to almost standards. What intrigues me about the doctype behavior of Mac IE 5 is the treatment of <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">, <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "ISO/IEC 15445:2000//DTD HTML//EN"> and <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "ISO/IEC 15445:1999//DTD HTML//EN">. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/
Received on Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:17:15 UTC