- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 17:46:40 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Larry Israel <lisrael@cruzio.com>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
On Sat, 8 Jan 2005, Larry Israel wrote: > > > > Sadly, when we are talking about billions of existing pages, making > > changes that would break existing content is an idea that Web browser > > vendors really can't seriously entertain. We have enough trouble with > > people saying pages don't work right in our browsers (i.e. not working > > like in the browser with most market share) without making it worse. > > That is only the case because CSS lacks a standard method of version > control (for lack of the proper term) -- the CSS equivalent of a doctype > declaration. Isn't that the case? Not really. Changing behaviour based on the version is very confusing to authors -- just look at the confusion people have over why their pages change rendering when viewed in quirks mode vs standards mode, or for pages sent as text/html vs pages sent as applicaiton/xhtml+xml. > Until such versioning becomes part of the standard, knowledgable web > authors will continue to devise and use a wide variety of CSS hacks > [1][2][3][4]. Of course these hacks are a major pain in the butt, but > they are considered a necessary evil, much like table layout, spacer > gifs, and many other workarounds used to be. These hacks work around bugs in browsers, not lack of versioning in the spec. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 11 January 2005 17:46:43 UTC