[whatwg] Quirks Mode Standard

[L. David Baron]

On Thursday 2012-02-09 15:51 +0100, Simon Pieters wrote:
> Today I started working on a spec for quirks mode. I used
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla_Quirks_Mode_Behavior as a
> starting point. The draft is here:
> 
> http://simon.html5.org/specs/quirks-mode

I'd note that the item "All of the style rules in
layout/style/quirk.css apply." probably needs to be expanded, and
items analyzed individually.

> It is very likely that more quirks need to be added, but as I went
> through the list I was surprised about how many of them were *not*
> widely implemented across browsers, and so may not be needed for Web
> compat and can be dropped.
> 
> I'm happy for the spec to be moved somewhere, and I can volunteer to
> edit it, but I can't promise to spend a lot of time on it.
> 
> It would be useful if browser implementors could review the draft,
> consider dropping quirks, give feedback about quirks that can't be
> dropped, and consider aligning with other implementations for quirks
> that are here to stay.

I'd note that there are sometimes messy interactions between
behaviors.  For example, if my memory is correct, implementing the
HTML5 parsing algorithm required that we implement a text-decoration
quirk that we previously didn't have (but WebKit did), as described
in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=572713 .  (Speaking
of which, I'm curious why that quirk, on propagation of
text-decoration into tables, didn't make it from the
developer.mozilla.org URL you gave into your document.  That makes
me think the document isn't quite ready for review yet.)

There may be cases where only some browsers have a described quirk,
but other browsers have a different behavior that provides the same
compatibility.


That said, I agree it's likely that many of the quirks can be
removed.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂