A CSS equivalent of HTML's DOCTYPE trigger

• From: Matthew Wilcox <elvendil@gmail.com>
• Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 19:28:32 +0000
• To: "www-style@w3.org Style" <www-style@w3.org>
• Message-Id: <172C4F00-38E6-419C-9264-AA76634D3AA2@gmail.com>

HTML has a useful property whereby the DOCTYPE was hijacked to trigger standards compliant rendering modes.

Some of CSS is sub-optimally implemented from a designer/typographer standpoint and there's not much tht can be done about it by us without breaking backward compatibility.

Has thought been put into an equivalent strategy for CSS? For example, opting into which branch or module we'd like to work?

I bring this up because I think the way typography is handled in CSS is simply fundamentally flawed from a typographers perspective, and un-resquable as is. If we could wind back the clock we could fix it, but we can't. How about we reset the clock? Allowing the author to choose which versions of the spec to adhere to?

That would allow us to, for example, re-write the way that font's are used in CSS, without breaking backward compatibility. User Agents that don't understand the trigger would simply ignore it.

Thoughts?

Received on Monday, 9 January 2012 20:20:55 UTC