In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Gervase Markham
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Henri Sivonen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote the latest version of the
> mozilla.org page wrapper and did some of the cross-browser testing. Ask
> him.
Is it my fault now? :-)
I didn't write the entire wrapper. I took the existing wrapper and
modified it in such a way that it doesn't contain markup that is
prohibited in HTML 4.01 Strict. (It is just a trick to achieve syntactic
validity. My modifications were intended as a short-term solution. The
wrapper, IMO, can't be described to be in compliance with the spirit of
the standards.)
The idea is that after my modification to the wrapper any page that is
valid HTML 4.01 Strict or Transitional will still pass the validator
after the wrapper has been applied. However, I haven't found any page at
www.mozilla.org that
a) uses the wrapper with the navigation sidebar on the left
and
b) is valid HTML 4.01 Transitional or Strict
There are some valid pages (eg. http://www.mozilla.org/docs/ fixed by
Endico). However, these use less intrusive light wrapping with
navigation links presented horizontally. (Personally, I prefer this less
intrusive wrapping style.)
(The fact that the banner appears wrong in Opera 5 is caused by a bug in
Opera. However, you could consider it my fault that I wasn't aware of
the Opera bug at the time that I made the modifications to the wrapper
and therefore I didn't develop a workaround.)
Now I'm finally getting to the point. :-)
The doctype declaration is not hard-coded in the wrapper script. This is
by design. The doctype declaration of the original document is written
out as is after the wrapping. It the document to be wrapped doesn't
contain a proper doctype, the wrapper script doesn't add a doctype.
**AFAIK, there is no cross-browser compatibility issue behind the
omission of the doctype.** As far as I can see, omitting the doctype is
just a mistake. (The fix would be trivial.)
As a long-term solution, I'd vote for the retirement of the current
design, the current wrapper and the old doc writing guidelines. (And
replacing them with HTML 4.01 Strict docs with semantic markup and a
good-looking style sheet--possibly based on fantasai's Skye style sheet.)
As a short-term solution, I suggest that the old doc writing guidelines
be retired and volunteers systematically check out unwrapped documents
from anonymous CVS, fix them to be valid HTML 4.01 and then someone with
CVS check-in access checks them in. Of course, this is futile as long as
people continue to use Composer 4.x for editing the pages. If we choose
to fix the markup of the docs (which I think we should do), we'll need
some sort of guideline against the use of broken editors.
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.clinet.fi/~henris/
