[whatwg] HTML6 Doctype

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 8:15 PM, David John Burrowes
<bainong at davidjohnburrowes.com> wrote:
> I agree that they don't have access to versioning info from within the languages.
>
> But, CSS has some sense of versions (CSS, CSS2, and CSS3).  This gives me some ability to say "ah, SurfBrowser 1.0 and 2.0 supported CSS1, but with 3.0 they supported some of CSS2 etc etc.

To be honest, no you can't.  Not with such large labels, at least.
You'll never be able to say "X browser supports CSS3", but CSS3 isn't
a thing.  You can name individual modules only, which is equivalent to
naming large features of HTML.


> That is, as long as I'm using the current browser, I know I've got support for whatever is latest.  But, when I'm providing support for folks using non-current browsers, there's some value in being able to estimate what will and won't work there. Saying "well, I have no idea if our app will work in the browser you have, because no one knows what form of the HTML spec it supported" doesn't go over very well with someone paying you money :-).

Your ability to tell what was supported by an old browser isn't
hampered at all by this.  No matter what, someone has to document what
that browser did.


> Maybe it would make more sense to version the test suite in some fashion?  Then one could say: "SurfBrowser 7.8 passes the HTML test suite of March 15th, 2012" and so as long as folks know what that test suite is validating, then this might address support issues just fine.

Potentially useful, but it seems just as useful to talk about which
features it passes the tests for.

~TJ