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

Dean Edwards dean.edwards at gmail.com
Tue Sep 29 12:53:44 PDT 2009


On 29/09/2009 20:41, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Dean Edwards<dean.edwards at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> You have two choices to get around the<dd>  rendering bug:
>>
>> 1. The potentially dangerous document.write()
>>
>> 2. Inserting weird conditional comments into your code:
>>
>>     </head>
>>      <!--[if lt IE 8]><object><!<![endif]-->
>>     <body>
>>
>> I don't like either solution.
>
> The third solution, of course, is just to avoid<details>  until IE7
> shrinks sufficiently to be ignored.  That won't take too much longer,
> and then you can start using it with impunity (aided by a js shim to
> give it functionality in the browsers that accept it but don't
> implement it yet).

It's going to take a while for IE7 to go away. In the meantime it 
becomes an education issue -- "You can start using HTML5 except 
<details> which will look OK in some browsers but completely break others."

> This whole thing is really much less of an issue than the<legend>
> problems were, where you'd have to wait for *every* current browser to
> phase out, as opposed to just two that are already declining nicely.

The <legend> issue was much easier to fix with JavaScript. But that was 
a horrible solution as well.

Can't we just invent some new elements? We've already created 20 new 
ones. Two more won't hurt. :)

-dean



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