[whatwg] Quirks Mode Standard

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 2/9/12 9:51 AM, Simon Pieters wrote:
> 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.

It's worth keeping in mind that the IE9 mode relevant for quirks "web 
compat" is the compat view quirks mode, as far as I can tell...

> 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.

1)  I'm fairly certain the "Images (img elements) without alt attributes 
sometimes display placeholder icons in quirks mode." quirk cannot be 
dropped.  The real point of that quirk is that this markup:

   <img width="100" height="100" src="404.html">

which links to some non-existent image needs to result in a box of width 
100 and height 100 in quirks mode; not doing that breaks all the various 
pages that (still) use "spacer gifs" pointing to bogus URIs.

I believe some UAs have this behavior in all modes; in Gecko the 
behavior is restricted to quirks mode.

2)  The "fixed width specified on a table cell resets the nowrap 
attribute." quirk seems to be implemented by everyone, effectively.  I 
would be really surprised if it can be dropped.

3)  Likewise for the "tables with no rows/rowgroups have zero height 
even when a height is specified" quirk.

4)  The CSS parsing quirks need to define behavior for shorthands.  How 
was the list of properties for the unitless px quirk generated, by the 
way?  It's interesting that 'font-size' is not in the list....

-Boris