Re: ID/Class Names beginning with numbers

2013-11-27 21:40, Philip Taylor wrote:

> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>> 2013-11-27 20:58, Philip Taylor wrote:
>
>>> In what way have they been misled, Jukka ?
>>
>> The way that they regard a syntax declaration as specifying a version in
>> a manner that would matter anything outside formal validation.
>
> I'm not convinced that people have been "misled";

I am. I have seen far too often statements saying that the DOCTYPE 
declares the "HTML version", followed by speculation on its effects on 
browsers. People even think they can't use HTML5 features if they 
"declare" HTML 4.01 (i.e., use an HTML 4.01 doctype).

> one reason for inserting the chosen DOCTYPE
> is to inform anyone considering validating the page that they
> should not seek to override it in the user interface other than
> for reasons of pure intellectual curiousity.

Why would an author of a page care the least of what other people do if 
they decide to use a validator on the page?

The Web would be a better place without this doctype nonsense. An author 
who wishes to validate a page can specify the method of validation quite 
independently of any magic strings in the page itself. But browsers 
decided to apply "doctype sniffing", so we have to use a doctype, and 
<!doctype html> is a simple way (quite independently of the "HTML 
version" issue).

> It make[s] a statement that the author of the web page claims to have
> some familiarity with the differences between various DOCTYPEs

Well, this probably applies to you, me, and a handful of other people, 
but most authors who slap a DOCTYPE string into their document (or have 
one inserted by their authoring software) have no idea of this.

I used to be passionate about keeping words like "valid", "validator", 
and "validity" in their technical SGML (or XML) sense, when discussing 
HTML documents. But this seems to be a lost cause. HTML5 uses the word 
"valid" freely and loosely, and I don't really blame them. Yet, now we 
have the situation that there is no objective way of deciding whether a 
document is valid or not (in the HTML5 sense); "valid" becomes a loose 
word like "good" or "OK".

Yucca

Received on Wednesday, 27 November 2013 19:56:06 UTC