[whatwg] 2.2.1. DOM feature strings

[Mihai Sucan]

Hello Hixie!

First of all, thanks for the reply to my very old email.

I changed my email subscription, from the ROBO Design account to Mihai  
Sucan. Please reply to the new email address. Thank you.


Le Thu, 24 May 2007 23:52:00 +0300, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> a écrit:

> On Mon, 7 Nov 2005, ROBO Design wrote:
>>
>> I have read 2.2.1. DOM feature strings [1] and I have the following
>> questions/impressions:
>>
>> a)
>> > User agents should respond with a true value when the hasFeature
>> > method is queried with these values.
>>
>> Why the word "should" is being used? This allows implementors to simply
>> not implement this, therefore not providing authors a way to check for
>> HTML 5 support (WA 1.0).
>
> It's a "should" because in some cases, e.g. experimental or incomplete
> implementations, the UA implementor would want to specifically return
> false so as to not make this mechanism useless.

Given my email was written loong time ago, I had lots of time to learn  
about what HTML 5 is, what Web Applications 1.0 is, and generally about  
web standards.

Thus, now I agree with the wording, yes "should" is correct. Anne van  
Kesteren has provided me with valuable feedback in November 2005.

>> b) The feature string "XHTML" combined with version string "5.0" is to
>> me not very inspired. Simple reason: XHTML 2. What if they get to XHTML
>> 5? In my opinion, checking for XHTML 5.0 should *not* be available.
>
> Are you still worried about this?

No, not at all. I didn't estimate WA 1.0 will ever become (X)HTML 5.

>> I'd like this to be available, because as a web developer I'm interested
>> to check in general if the user agent supposes it has support for WA
>> 1.0. When I want to do a general check I wouldn't like to write a huge
>> script which checks the availability of each of the WA 1.0 DOM stuff I
>> use.
>
> You can check the feature string, that's why it's there. But it won't  
> tell
> you much. Browsers don't support HTML5 or not support HTML5. They support
> bits of it. For example all browsers support <div>. But no browsers today
> support <datagrid>. What should today's browsers do when queried about
> whether they support HTML5 in hasFeature?

Well said. Now I agree and I better understand the reasoning behind the  
choices made in HTML 5.

Thanks again for the feedback.



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