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

Sun Mar 11 04:55:23 PDT 2007

Le Sun, 11 Mar 2007 02:37:30 +0200, Matthew Ratzloff  
<matt at builtfromsource.com> a écrit:

> Relying on headers is a good way to get people to ignore that part of the
> specification.  Web designers don't want to worry about headers and
> .htaccess files.  It has to be syntactic.

Agreed.

> I don't understand what's wrong with DOCTYPEs, myself.
>
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
>    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//WHATWG//DTD HTML 5.0//EN"
>    "http://www.whatwg.org/dtd/html5/strict.dtd">
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 5.0//EN"
>    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/strict.dtd">
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
>    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
>
> The seem to serve the purpose.  If there are two HTML 5 specifications,
> browser makers can come together to decide which one to support by  
> default
> when no DOCTYPE is present.  Developers who would prefer the alternate
> standard could use the appropriate DOCTYPE.

Hmm... What's the use of a DTD if no UA cannot rely on it? If no UA will  
verify the code against the DTD, if no UA will even download it?

I don't know why... but I have the impression some of the people  
participating in this discussion want a DOCTYPE DTD just like they want a  
<html version> atrtibute. This simply means that the DOCTYPE definition,  
by itself, is stripped by all technical value (the value of defining a  
DTD), changing its role to a simple tag/line for "informing" the UA and  
human code readers about the intentions of the author: "I sing HTML5".

> -Matt

Hello Matt :). I think you miss quoted me. This is *not* what I said:

>> On Mar 10, 2007, at 8:38 AM, Mihai Sucan wrote:
>>
>> We're already using headers to swap between HTML and XHTML (since we
>> still call both .html files).  Headers are for telling user agents
>> how to deal with content.  It seems like sending a header "X-
>> STANDARDS-MODE: HTML5;" (or "WHATWG-HTML5" if W3C's HTML 5 is
>> significantly different) or setting an http-equiv meta tag to tell IE
>> to use their super-standards mode is cleaner and more desirable as it
>> doesn't bloat the spec, and should be more than enough for them.  If
>> their standards mode for HTML5 has flaws and they need a NEW switch,
>> it can be changed to "X-STANDARDS-MODE: HTML6;" or whatever the
>> latest version of HTML is.  This can be set across an entire server
>> in a few seconds via config files if needed, or set on a single
>> folder via .htaccess files.  If headers are used, that also doesn't
>> bloat the file if is is saved on someone's HDD.

That was actually said by Robert Brodrecht. :)

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