[whatwg] The new content model for <details> breaks rendering in MSIE5-7

[Remy Sharp]

On 14 Oct 2009, at 11:06, Remco wrote:

>>  2. Use <legend>, and don't expect to be able to use it in any  
>> browsers
>>    sanely for a few years.
>>
>>  3. Use <dt>/<dd>, and don't expect to be able to use it in old  
>> versions
>>    of IE without rather complicated and elaborate hacks for a few  
>> years.
>>
>> I am not convinced of the wisdom of #4. I prefer #2 long term, but  
>> I see
>> the argument for #3.
>
> So what you'd expect is that #3 would take about 4 years to completely
> fix itself, and #2 would take about 5 years. With such a small
> difference, I'd just choose the best option in the long term.

Option #2 affects every major browser currently on the market (i.e.  
it's broken) - I'm excluding betas.  That's Opera, Firefox, IE, Safari  
& Chrome.

Option #3 only affects IE7 and below - which is 30+% of the market,  
but at the very least IE8 has it right - which means that (I would  
hope) future versions of IE won't have this bug.

I'd be amazed if IE7 is flushed out of the major market share (20%  
since Firefox is around that mark) within 5 years (personally I'm  
expecting to be around for longer) - rather than amazed, going by the  
growth rates (of other browsers), I'm saying it won't happen.

So to say that *all* the browsers that we currently have are going to  
be down to a insignificant market share, that we can sensibly use  
legend is going to much more than 5 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

With that in mind, and having to choose the lesser of two evils  
(though semantically I know which I prefer), option #3 is the only  
sensible choice if you want authors to use these elements in a  
reasonable amount of time.


Remy Sharp.