[whatwg] Using the HTML5 DOCTYPE as a new quirksmode switch

Sat Mar 10 02:16:09 PST 2007

Le Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:46:15 +0200, Alexey Feldgendler  
<alexey at feldgendler.ru> a écrit:

> On Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:53:09 +0100, Asbjørn Ulsberg  
> <asbjorn at tigerstaden.no> wrote:
>
>>> This is a plain simple yet brilliant idea.
>
>> Thanks. :)
>> I'm sad there aren't more replies to this wonderful idea, though! :-P
>
> There would be replies if your idea was incomplete or controversial, but  
> actually it seems like everyone agrees. What worries me is whether there  
> is a chance that Microsoft actually does what's suggested (and whether  
> someone in Microsoft who is in position to influence this decision  
> actually finds out about this idea and gets convinced).

I did follow this discussion since the first email. I saw that the idea is  
very well welcomed.

Alexey, actually I'm skeptical about this. First impression I had reading  
the first post was "hey, do we need yet another switch?". What's  
"super-duper" standards mode after all?

How will tutorials look:

1. For quirks mode use no DOCTYPE.

2. For standards mode use one of the following DOCTYPEs:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"  
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">
...

3. For "super-duper" standards mode use the following DOCTYPE:

<!DOCTYPE html>

My point is: we either want it, or not, what we have today called as  
"standards mode" is also buggy (each browser has its own set of rendering  
bugs). If IE adds the third level of rendering, then we have yet another  
DOCTYPE switch.

Microsoft needs to make the improvements in the current standards mode -  
as they did now with IE 7. They need to continue this.

Adding a new DOCTYPE switch is not a solution to Microsoft's problem.

However, if this proposal makes it into IE.next, it wouldn't be a problem  
(since it triggers standards mode in the other browsers, and it's fairly  
safe to use).

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