Rob Crowther wrote:
OK, then define "parsed and rendered correctly".
Exactly as you meant it in your earlier message :
whether or not a browser will correctly parse, interpret or display it.
Or, put another way: where is the parsing process for a text file conforming to HTML4's DTD defined so that we can judge the correctness of a given browser's parsing behaviour?
The specification for the parsing process for HTML 4.01 is directly derivable for the specification for the parsing process for SGML, taking into account any notes in the DTD where the exact behaviour could not be specified in SGML or differed therefrom.
Since the spec is based on what browser actually do, the only way it will change 'at any time' is if all the major browsers suddenly changed their behaviour. If the spec didn't change at that time, because it was a Recommendation or whatever, would you write your documents to conform to the spec or to conform to what browsers actually did?
To the specification, of course [1] : if I don't write to the specification, I have no right to complain to the browser vendors when their implementations fail to conform. To base a specification on what a particular subset of browsers do at some arbitrary point in time is to completely fail to understand the reason for a specification in the first place. Philip Taylor -------- [1] When current browsers (Netscape 4, I think it was) required four non-standard attributes in the <BODY> tag in order to get things positioned satisfactorily, all pages for which I was responsible (a not-inconsiderable number) specified an augmented DTD in the DOCTYPE directive in order that the pages both validate and render correctly. I am unaware of any facility for augmenting the HTML 5 non-DTD in a similar way to get around future failures to conform. ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
