[whatwg] Issues concerning the <base> element and xml:base

[Simon Pieters]

On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:23:54 +0200, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> wrote:

>>  Please don't introduce more quirks mode nonsense. We have more than  
>> enough already as it is.
>
> I'm not saying that we should add it to the spec. I'm saying that  
> firefox might be able to remove support for the weird <base> behavior in  
> standards mode, while retaining it in quirks mode.

I believe Anne meant "don't introduce more differences between quirks mode  
and standards mode".

> I dislike quirks mode stuff too, but any other choice isn't very pretty  
> here either. I can see 3 possible solutions:
>
> 1. What we do now, i.e. support multiple <base> elements in both quirks
>     and standards mode. If the spec will not support multiple <base> then
>     this would make us non-compliant with the spec.
>
> 2. Not support multiple <base> elements in either quirks nor standards
>     mode. This would break a lot of pages (36000 in hixies test) for
>     no really good reason since very little code is needed to deal with
>     it.
>
> 3. Only support multiple <base> elements in quirks mode but not standard
>     mode.
>
> Pick your poison.

#1.

If a lot of pages rely on it, then any UA that has an interest in  
supporting the real Web would like to implement it, and so it should be  
specced in HTML5. If you're being non-compliant with the spec because you  
want to support the Web then it's the spec that is wrong, not the  
implementation.

Personally I would like to see quirks mode, almost standards mode,  
standards mode and XHTML mode be as close to each other as possible  
(perhaps even merging almost standards mode with standards mode, in other  
words dropping standards mode). It makes authoring, implementation and QA  
a lot simpler.

-- 
Simon Pieters