On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Vadim Plessky wrote:
> I understand that both MS and Netscape needed such "ignore as undefined"
> feature. Probably, they pushed it to standards body, as they, for sure, were
> controlling around 95% of browser market, especially in 1995-1996...
>
> By the way, from consumer's point of view, MS's concept (auto-correcting)
> sound more reasonable to me.
In the real world, where standards evolve, that's a very bad idea. In
MSIE4 (and maybe even 5.0 as well), a selector such as "DIV > P" was
interpreted as "DIV P" since MSIE auto-corrected the extraneous ">" that
was not part of the CSS1 selector syntax. Then, in CSS2, the working
group introduced the new ">" combinator. This means style rules written
in CSS2 using the descendent combinator will do bizarre and unintended
things in MSIE4 rather than just be ignored.
If you'd prefer that the CSS spec never contain a new feature, then your
position is fine. However, if you've ever asked for or wanted a new
feature to be added to CSS, then it's hypocritical.
-David
--
L. David Baron <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
Mozilla Contributor <URL: http://www.mozilla.org/ >
Invited Expert, W3C CSS WG <URL: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ >
