- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:43:30 -0500
- To: www-tag@w3.org
- Cc: Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>
- Message-ID: <OFC22FFB91.DF2FB1F1-ON852573DE.00754997-852573DE.007717F4@lotus.com>
Chris Wilson has posted a very interesting note [1] on his Microsoft blog explaining some things about the plans for support of standards-compliant rendering in the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. Chris discusses some of Microsoft's past experiences with changing rendering conventions in IE, and then says (I've added links in [this form] for the benefit of those of you who will be getting this note as text/plain): "Aaron Gustafson, one of the members of the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force wrote an article [2] detailing where we ended up that was posted on A List Apart [3] today; I highly recommend reading it for a different perspective. I’ll summarize, though, that: 1. “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content. 2. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content. 3. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article." Point 3 suggests that Microsoft will be using a nonstandard (I.e. not blessed by HTTP and pertinent Recommendations) <meta> tag to trigger interpretation as standards-compliant HTML+CSS. The TAG, before my time as a member, considered the issue then known as "contentTypeOverride-24" which is registered in our new Tracker-based system as Issue 24 [4]. The TAG also published a finding title "Authoritative Metadata" [5], which focuses on the importance of correctly using standard mechanisms such as Content-Type for conveying and determining representation metadata. From the Summary of Key Points in that finding: 1. * Metadata received in an encapsulating container, such as the metadata within the header fields of a message that describe the data enclosed within that message, is authoritative in defining the nature of the data received. 2. * Inconsistency between representation data and metadata is an error that should be discovered and corrected rather than silently ignored. 3. * An agent MUST NOT ignore or override authoritative metadata without the consent of the party employing the agent. 4. * Specifications MUST NOT work against the Web architecture by requiring or suggesting that a recipient override authoritative metadata without user consent. I am writing here for myself, not for the TAG as a whole, and it is not my intention to prejudge the decisions that Microsoft is making in trying to balance adherence to Web standards with a need to preserve interoperability with Web content that's already deployed. I do think it would be worthwhile to discuss a bit on this list what we can learn from the experiences that Chris has shared in his blog. Maybe or maybe not the TAG would eventually want to weigh in with suggestions on how Web architecture might best be applied, but I think that in any case a bit of discussion and consideration might be interesting at this point. Noah [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx [2] http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype [3] http://alistapart.com/issues/251 [4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/24 [5] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Monday, 28 January 2008 21:43:11 UTC