[whatwg] HTML syntax: comments before doctype and doctypesniffing

Simon Pieters zcorpan at hotmail.com
Sun Dec 3 15:49:39 PST 2006


Hi,

From: Spartanicus <spartanicus.3 at ntlworld.ie>
>I'm assuming that this comment merely documents IE's current behaviour.
>Please ignore my other comment if I'm wrong.

A comment before the doctype has equal status as lack of doctype or an 
incorrect doctype. Hence, conformance checkers will flag such documents as 
non-conforming, and the syntax section should only allow things that will 
pass conformance checking.

>There are valid reasons to kick IE into quirks mode whilst triggering
>"standards mode" in other browsers.

What are those reasons?

>There is existing content on the web
>that intentionally does this. Why would you want to deny an author who
>fully understands the issues from doing this?

I don't want to deny authors anything, I just want the syntax section and 
the parsing section to agree. If there really are valid reasons to have 
comments before the doctype then the parsing section should change instead 
of the syntax section.

Regards,
Simon Pieters

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