- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:24:53 +0300
- To: www-tag@w3.org
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
> On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, Dan Brickley wrote: > > > > > > Isn't this the problem the Candidate Recommendation stage is > supposed > > > to address? Having serious CR phases, where we aim for two > complete > > > implementations of the entire specification (including all > optional > > > parts, and with no bugs, and with a comprehensive test suite > written > > > with the intent of finding every last edge case bug) seems like it > > > would avoid the problem of doing things poorly, or at least > reduce the > > > likelihood to the point where it would be rare enough to not be > enough > > > to justify adding syntax-level support for routing around such > > > problems later. > > > > This would be nice. Can you suggest any inspirational precedents > for a > > comparably-complex technology? > > It's basically what we've been doing with CSS, to good success. We are coming to a point where doctype sniffing and the modes have almost nothing to do with HTML itself[1] and almost everything to do with CSS. (WebKit and Opera show that the modes don't really need to have much (anything?) to do with the DOM APIs, either.) Furthermore, CSS has not needed new modes (or 'versions') in browsers that don't have "MSIE" in their User-Agent string[2] after the CSS WG started being very serious about the two interoperable implementations requirement (as opposed to pushing CSS2 to REC years ahead of implementation experience in the context of existing Web content). [1] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/last-html-quirk/ [2] Consider http://hsivonen.iki.fi/chrome-ua/ : a new product was launched triggering just about every UA sniffer *except* the scripts that look for "MSIE" -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Thursday, 23 April 2009 17:25:35 UTC