[whatwg] a few comments to Webforms 2.0 Call For Comments

[Henri Sivonen]

On Aug 1, 2004, at 06:10, Matthew Thomas wrote:

>> Now, similar argumentation does not work on the HTML side if we agree 
>> not to pretend that real SGML is being processed. Doctype sniffing is 
>> a tag soup solution to a tag soup problem.
>
> That's an extrapolation from a single data point. The only use of 
> doctype sniffing *so far* has been to handle quirky style/layout 
> expectations of old pages (and in the case of table style inheritance, 
> they wouldn't even need to be tag-soup pages). In the long run, 
> doctype sniffing may become a general-purpose method of changing *any* 
> undesired behavior (whether de-facto or de-jure) of old syntax in new 
> spec versions.

 From an XML or SGML point of view the syntactic construct is not 
appropriate for such use. That's why I said doctype sniffing is a tag 
soup solution.

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