- From: Alan Gresley <alan1@azzurum.com>
- Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:49:09 -0700
- To: "Paul Nelson \(ATC\)" <paulnel@winse.microsoft.com>
- cc: www-style@w3.org
Paul Nelson wrote: > If large users don't rapidly convert their content because it would cost them millions of Dollars or Euros and a large amount of time, a measured approach to migration is the best course to take. My guess is that because a number of large organizations are involved in the W3C they are moving eventually. > > My response to your initial mail is to inject reality into the discussion. Having a measured migration path (e.g. using DOCTYPE) and not just breaking people will engender better feelings from those who don't want their work to suddenly break. We found this out with IE7 changes. It is painful. > > I would argue that defaulting a page that has no DOCTYPE to be standards compliant may not be the best option. There are many legacy pages out there that would break. If a person sets the DOCTYPE then that should be honored...and may still break some pages. > > It would be really great if we can collectively come up with a solution that is workable for the millions of people that use the web and not just flame or trash each other. Who cares if the user has Opera, Mozilla, Safari or even IE? Can we create a way that web authors can count on to take them to the future of interoperability? > > > > Paul I agree fully with this. One suggestion though this might not go down well with users or other quarters. Have two big buttons in the toolbar. One button for legacy content that will render the page either in "almost standards mode" and "quirks mode" depending on the doctype and the other button for "standards mode." The user get to choose which mode is better in rendering. The default setting out of the box would be "standard mode." If the page looks a bit stange then the user can click the legacy content button to see if it's any better. If IE8 is able to tell if a page needs standard mode to access the page like support for a modern or recent standard (not just CSS) then the legacy content button is grayed out and inoperative. This could also possibly be activated by some method in a stylesheet with a CSS comment. /* [if IE 8 standard-mode] */ Alan http://css-class.com/
Received on Thursday, 20 December 2007 23:56:07 UTC