Re: versioning, robustness principle, doctypes etc

On Aug 10, 2009, at 13:34, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:

> * Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Having an in-band version indicator for conformance checking makes  
>> the
>> following unwritten assumptions:
>>
>> * It's appropriate for a person opting to target an older "version"
>> not to see more up-to-date advice. (Surely newer advice should be
>> assumed to be better informed and, thus, better advice.)
>>
>> * If the person running a conformance checker and the person
>> producing the markup are different people (or the same person at
>> different times), the markup producer should choose the checker  
>> target
>> "version"--not the person invoking the checker.
>
> Your assumptions are based on the assumption that conformance to some
> version is somehow different to conformance to a different version  
> from
> the perspective of a conformance checker. Otherwise there could not be
> good advice and bad advice, only correct and incorrect "advice", and
> there would be no "target version" to consider. I would regard this as
> incorrect, and hence your assumptions as not implied by inline labels.


I'm assuming that if language level n+1 makes something non-conforming  
that was conforming in language level n, the newer spec does so for a  
good reason. If people have language level n version identifiers in  
their documents, they miss out on this important advice.

Basically if current wisdom is that <font> is evil, <font> doesn't  
become less evil if you add an HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 4 September 2009 14:27:14 UTC