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

Sun Mar 11 15:20:36 PDT 2007

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007 06:40:18 +0100, Matthew Ratzloff  
<matt at builtfromsource.com> wrote:
> I don't care about DTD, but DOCTYPE is established, so it seems strange  
> to trash it in favor of something new when the benefit is questionable  
> (as
> far as I can tell).  It is also evident to me that there needs to be some
> kind of versioning--consistent rendering shouldn't be a moving target.

There needs to be versioning? The web has done great so far without it...  
I'm not sure I really see the need.

> If DTD is out, bring back the deprecated "version" attribute that it
> replaced.  Assuming there is only one version of HTML 5.0, the following
> would work:
>
> <html version="5.0" mode="strict" encoding="UTF-8" lang="en-US">
> ...
> </html>
>
> All attributes optional, obviously.

What exactly would this help with? (I might be convinced that a  
meaningless version="" attribute is useful for conformance checkers. To  
make conformance not a moving target. However, given that other  
interpreting software, such as web browsers, do change, maybe conformance  
should too.)

-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>