[whatwg] HTML6 Doctype

[Joshua Cranmer]

  On 08/29/2010 11:33 AM, David John Burrowes wrote:
> As I see it, if I'm developing for other major platforms (java, osx, windows, ...) I have a fair degree of certainty which versions of those platforms support what features, and that's really useful in situations where I'm targeting (either for development or support) the non-current version.  So, I have some trouble understanding why it is good to put (what I hope will be) a lot of innovation in just the HTML spec into one undifferentiated definition. (and, presumably similar stories for the other standards specs)
OS X and Windows both pretty much have one implementation (WINE is not 
sufficiently complete or important to count in this regard), and Java is 
largely driven by a single implementation. So you can delineate support 
primarily by "what this version supports."--you don't have to worry 
about differences between different implementations.

HTML and CSS have at least four major independent implementations 
(Gecko, Webkit, Trident, Presto, and there are other notable but not 
quite so heavy market share implementations). That means that features 
are implemented and experimented on at four different rates; the exact 
level of support for a particular version would be different for all of 
them, at least until they all "fully" implemented it (leaving aside the 
exact definition of "full implementation").

Most authors don't care about whether or not an implementation supports 
an entire, full specification; they just want to know "Can I use this 
feature in this browser?" So saying that all major implementations 
support much of CSS 2 to a high degree of correctness is useless for 
knowing if, say, the author can use display: run-in. In other words, the 
feature tables that you think are indicative of a problem are what web 
authors would actually use in real life.

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth