[whatwg] [html5] tags, elements and generated DOM

Thu Apr 7 17:21:10 PDT 2005

Olav Junker Kjær wrote:

> Jim Ley wrote:
>
>> Would a version parameter not be more appropriate, simpler, less
>> confusing to users, easier to parse, easier to understand, doesn't
>> confuse users into thinking that it's really an application of SGML. 
>> Doesn't cause problems for legacy user agents like the HTML Validator
>> etc. etc.
>
>
> Actually, the HTML element has a (deprecated!) version attribute, 
> which could be used for this purpose. I agree it feels cleaner than 
> using the doctype syntax.
>
> OTOH authors are going to use doctypes for the forseeable future 
> anyway, since they want to trigger standards compliant mode in 
> browsers, so we might as well put the doctype to some use.

Wouldn't authors need to use an HTML4 or an XHTML doctype specifically 
to trigger the standards mode in IE6? In that case, specifying a doctype 
of our own would be counter-productive to the goal of compatibility with 
IE6.

Perhaps we need to specify that any DOCTYPE will be ignored when there 
is an <html version="5.0"> present.
--
Leons Petrazickis