[whatwg] Re: Transition from Legacy to Native rendering

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> > >
> > > Oh right, great what tech do you use?
> >
> > The |navigation| object, e.g.
>
> the navigation object is identical between IE and IceBrowser, you
> cannot differentiate them.

If compatibility with IceBrowser is a concern, I'm sure you'll be able to
find a solution.


> > > even the conditional comment method is flawless but that's getting
> > > pretty obscure.
> >
> > That's another way.
>
> Oops, it looks like I left out a NOT from the sentance, it's not
> flawless, it still turns up both false positives, and false negatives.

Given that to compliant UAs a "conditional comment" is just a comment, any
false positive is a bug. How can you get a false negative?


> > > 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?
>
> in any number of ways, both binary and script based.

Great!


> > 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.
>
> Where does the spec say 1.6.1 only applies to attributes defined in
> HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0?

There's nothing in that section that says that bogusattribute=""  should
be reflected in the DOM as a dynamically added property on the interface.
It's not an HTML attribute.


> I also don't really see why the fact it violates the spec here is a bad
> thing, but adding innerHTML violations are okay -

Who said they were ok?


> For me this seems a very good one, and fully in the spirit of
> compatibility (new attributes are treated exactly the same as existing
> ones.)

No, they're not. They all get returned as strings, not at all following
the principles outlined in the section you cited.

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