Re: [html] Elements within "title"?

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Henri Sivonen wrote:

>> Compatibility with what?
>
> With the existing practice.

Well, any change means _some_ deviation from the existing practice. You 
seem to imply that any future version of HTML has to be suitable for 
existing browsers. While that has roughly been the idea when HTML has been 
extended, it has never been very systematic. For example, when tables were 
added a long ago, they weren't compatible in the sense that non-table 
browsers would render them in any reasonably way (though there were some 
tricks to get a somewhat reasonable rendering). And when <tfoot> was 
added, there was no compatibility - browsers that are unaware of it render 
it in a wrong place.

> More to the point, it *would* break things.

My question was whether that would be the case. I still don't see how, 
though I'm not saying that allowing normal inline content in <title> 
cannot seriously break anything. It's still an open question.

It's also an open question whether the proposal would improve things in 
practice. It would be more useful to allow several <title> elements in a 
single document, possibly with attributes reflecting the intended use of 
the title, such as type="long", type="medium", and type="short". The point 
is that the title element content is now used in many ways, and some of 
the ways require quite short texts whereas others might reasonably allow 
fairly long texts. Using brutal truncation to, say, 8 or 10 characters 
seldom gives a good result. This approach should have few problems, since 
existing browsers would probably just ignore all but the last (or maybe 
the first) <title> element.

> I think he meant the serializability of conforming XHTML document trees as 
> HTML.

Perhaps, but that really amounts to feeding XHTML, written with some 
special restrictions, to tag soup processors. XHTML is as serial as HTML.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Tuesday, 27 February 2007 14:44:14 UTC