[whatwg] HTML 5 Script Tag

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Tab Atkins Jr.<jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
> <script src> is the way it is.  It's inconsistent, but that's how
> generations of browsers have worked.  Trying to change it in the way
> you suggest not only doesn't work in legacy browsers, it *actively
> breaks* pages in those browsers.  It is simply *not* something that
> would work unless you did a complete reboot with a purposefully
> incompatible language - that was tried with XHTML2, and that spec is
> dead now.  We're simply going to have to live with the warts of
> earlier HTML

This logic says we shouldn't remove existing features that current
websites depend on, but it doesn't prevent us from introducing new
features to improve consistency in the long term.  Authors shouldn't
use the features (e.g., src= on <style>) as long as there are some
browsers that don't support them, of course, but eventually they
should be usable.  It wouldn't really allow you to do anything you
couldn't do already, but the same is true for plenty of HTML 5
features.