[whatwg] [web-apps] Some comments

Matthew Raymond mattraymond at earthlink.net
Sun Aug 8 15:38:09 PDT 2004


Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> Why is the content model of the COMMAND element empty? It would be
>>> a lot better imo if it was designed like BUTTON. That would also
>>> mean that the LABEL attribute can be left out.
>>
>> The <command> button is intended to be used in situations where you 
>> don't want the menu to render at all on a legacy browser. Therefore,
>> if it has text inside it, that text will be rendered when the user
>> doesn't want it to be.
> 
> We have CSS to deal with this. Markup should be designed independent
> from presentation, especially when that is possible.
> 
> (And it is possible, since Internet Explorer 6.0 does support 'display'
> enough to deal with this.)

    Assumptions in the above statement:

1) The legacy UA supports CSS, specifically the "display" property.

2) The webmaster knows CSS in addition to HTML4 + WA1.

3) The legacy UA doesn't have a CSS document that overrides the web 
page's CSS with regards to unknown tags.

4) The browser supports styling of unknown elements without some kind of 
markup hack or the use of something like an HTC.

    Furthermore, all our "gracefully degradation" solutions so far have 
not required CSS.



More information about the whatwg mailing list