[whatwg] Re: Transition from Legacy to Native rendering

[Jim Ley]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 18:16:52 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > 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.

I understood the whole point of this was graceful degradation, so why
would it be a concern to me, I think it's unlikely I'll be using WF2
for many years (since I don't want to degrade to my most important
platform, it's inefficient) but I'd like to make sure I can keep
viewing content, and who knows I might be wrong.

> > 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?

When using it to identify IE, you can use conditional comments to both
fail to identify IE when it is in use, and identify it as IE when it's
not - they're false positives and false negatives.  Also please
remember you cannot talk about condtional comment differences being a
compliance issue, conditional comments are not outlawed in ECMA 262.

> > 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?

Oh right,  so you think I'll have an easy job getting it removed from
Mozilla then as it's non-conformant?  If not, and it's fine for
"conformant UA's" to include that, then it's just as fine for everyone
else to include other logical extensions.

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

Since they're not validating UA's there's no doctype reading going on,
in any case, my example page didn't provide a DTD, and so string was a
perfectly acceptable choice IMO.

Jim.