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

Sat Mar 10 04:27:32 PST 2007

On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:16:09 +0100, Mihai Sucan <mihai.sucan at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> 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>

The tutorials will just say "Use <!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.

The reason why modes other than the best standards mode exist is that a  
significant number of existing documents are written while keeping the  
non-standard browser behavior in mind, and it's unacceptable to change the  
rendering of those documents dramatically.

Actually, the best standards mode available is the only right mode to work  
in. The other modes are only supported for backward compatibility with  
existing documents.

-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com