[whatwg] Quirks Mode Standard

[Simon Pieters]

On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:15:43 +0100, L. David Baron <dbaron at dbaron.org>  
wrote:

> 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.

Sure. I think however that that has partially already been done as part of  
Hixie writing HTML's Rendering section, and so is probably out of scope  
for this document.

>> 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.)

It's in a comment in the source. I noticed that it was missing in HTML's  
Rendering section and filed a bug.

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15941

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

Yeah. In such cases, we need to pick one quirk and spec that.

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

One form of "removing quirks" is to propagate them to also apply in  
standards mode, which is doable if standards mode Web content doesn't rely  
on the quirk being *absent*, and is something the HTML spec has done for  
many things (e.g. parsing of legacy colors).

> -David
>

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software