- From: Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>
- Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 11:35:53 -0800
- To: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Cc: <www-style@w3.org>
On 3/25/04 11:05 AM, "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote: >>> doctype sniffing >>> itself is theoretically absurd >> >> but works quite well in practice. > > Even if it were true (it surely isn't) Of course it's true. Old pages (before stricter renderers started appearing) are still rendered fairly close to how they were, and New valid strict pages are rendered as they should be. Professional web developers in general broadly agree on this. >>> and pragmatically a horrendous mess. >> >> where's the mess? > > I thought this had been discussed at nauseam, It has, and the conclusion was the opposite of what you are saying. > and I have no intentions of > raising a discussion that won't change anything, you did (raise it). > but the fact is that > doctype sniffing is poorly documented IMHO it shouldn't be documented at all. That's the point. Authors should write valid compliant content, or otherwise expect a random result. > and not known to most authors, They shouldn't have to know about it. > and it is carried out in incompatible ways by browsers. Nonsense. Either browsers handle valid content correctly or not, that has nothing to do with DOCTYPE switching. >> and do you have an alternative proposal to DOCTYPE switching that you can >> demonstrate to be better? > > I have no alternative proposal Indeed, as my rhetorical question implied. > but if you wanted to make browsers operate in different > modes when rendering HTML, there's the old version attribute in <html> and > the possibility of introducing a parameter for the media type. Why would you want to standardize old/broken/non-compliant/horribly-messy/tag-soup rendering? Tantek
Received on Thursday, 25 March 2004 14:37:15 UTC