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

Sat Mar 10 02:39:46 PST 2007

On Mar 10, 2007, at 11:16 AM, Mihai Sucan wrote:

> 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.

indeed

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

As far as I understand it, the new DOCTYPE switch is meant to 'tell'  
to browser the document follows the HTML5 specification. HTML5 is set  
up to be backwards compatible with HTML4 documents. The opposite does  
not hold. There must be at least one new DOCTYPE to 'tell' the  
browser HTML5 is being served.
<!DOCTYPE html> seems to be a suitable candidate. This doctype can be  
used by vendors to proxy the content to the right rendering engine.  
Vendors can either rebuild a new engine from scratch, or improve  
specific parts of their rendering engine.

>
> 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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