[whatwg] 2.2.1. DOM feature strings

ROBO Design robodesign at gmail.com
Mon Nov 7 06:14:25 PST 2005


Hello!

I have read 2.2.1. DOM feature strings [1] and I have the following  
questions/impressions:

a)
> User agents should respond with a true value when the hasFeature
> method is queried with these values.

Why the word "should" is being used? This allows implementors to simply  
not implement this, therefore not providing authors a way to check for  
HTML 5 support (WA 1.0).

b) The feature string "XHTML" combined with version string "5.0" is to me  
not very inspired. Simple reason: XHTML 2. What if they get to XHTML 5? In  
my opinion, checking for XHTML 5.0 should *not* be available.

c) hasFeature("WA", "1.0") should be also available, because the  
specification defines Web Applications 1.0 (aka HTML 5).

d)
> in general, therefore, use of this method is discouraged.

How are authors supposed to check for WA 1.0 support in the user agent? I  
agree that user agents are not perfect and therefore they might return  
true (or false) even if they do (not) support WA 1.0.

I am also aware developers are supposed to check for the existence of each  
property/method before using it.

I'd like this to be available, because as a web developer I'm interested  
to check in general if the user agent supposes it has support for WA 1.0.  
When I want to do a general check I wouldn't like to write a huge script  
which checks the availability of each of the WA 1.0 DOM stuff I use.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#dom-feature

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