[whatwg] Re: Transition from Legacy to Native rendering

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> >
> > It is trivial to detect WinIE in JS. (It is even easier to conditionally
> > load HTCs only in IE. But that's another story.)
>
> Oh right, great what tech do you use?

The |navigation| object, e.g.


> even the conditional comment method is flawless but that's getting
> pretty obscure.

That's another way.


> In any case detecting IE is not enough, we need to detect an IE that
> doesn't support WF2 (remember I can implement WF2 on top of IE easily
> enough, I'm even considering it if the spec evolves into something I'm
> happy with.)

As a binary plugin, you mean?


> > > Could you also list where the behaviour is outlawed, and in which
> > > specification?
> >
> > DOM2 HTML lists the members one should see on HTMLParagraphElement
> > instances. "bogusattribute" is not one of them.
>
> IE makes no claims to support DOM2 HTML in its hasFeature
> implementation, so what that spec says is irrelevant to it's or any
> other non DOM2 browser.

Ok, DOM1 HTML then.


> In any case 1.6.1 of DOM 2 HTML seems to make it pretty clear that HTML
> attributes map directly to properties, the only argument is if
> attributes defined elsewhere than HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 should apply,
> and I believe clearly that they should since it makes clear sense to
> (obviously the DOM 2 HTML warning on interopability needs to apply, but
> we'll always have that when we're working with extensions.)

This may come as a surprise, but standards compliance is not a matter of
guessing the spec author's intent and implementing that, it's about
implementing the letter of the spec.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'