Interviewed by CNN on 12/12/2012 10:14, Philip TAYLOR told the world: > > > MCBastos wrote: > >> HTML 4.01 Strict is becoming less useful nowadays that most browsers at >> least recognize the HTML5 header. > > I respectfully disagree. If your intention is to code to a ratified > W3C specification, then HTML 4.01 is your specification of choice; if > you want your code to take advantage of bleeding-edge technoology (that > allows, for example, Ebay to waste your bandwidth with advertising videos > in which you have zero interest), and if you are willing to re-write > your page every time the HTML 5 /draft/ specification changes (it is > described by the W3C as a "work-in-progress"), then by all means adopt > HTML 5, but don't expect that the page that you write today will > necessarily be valid in one year's time.
You do have a point, but the reality of the Web is that developers seldom restrict themselves to stable, ratified standards. And, while there are a lot of experimental stuff being done under the "HTML5" banner which are still in flux, and indeed are subject to change at any time, there are features which are quite stable and enjoy very wide support among user-agents. My point was not that "4.01 strict is useless;" I did not say that. It was that it lost some of its usefulness, because even if you are *not* using bleeding-edge stuff, using an HTML5 declaration gives you some convenience and loses very little, if anything. For instance, some elements were deprecated in HTML4 but brought back in HTML5. So, you have basically three choices regarding them: - Use them, declare as Transitional and trigger Quirks mode; - Not use them (working around them by essentially recreating the same functionality in CSS), which is more work, and declare as Strict, getting Standards mode; - Or use them, declare as HTML5 and get Strict mode. Essentially, you get to have your cake and eat it too. Yes, people using very old browsers (IE 6 and the like) may have some problems with pages declared as HTML5. But then, those old browsers will have problems with just about *anything* you throw them that hasn't been specifically checked for stupid-bugs-compatibility. If you don't mind breaking compatibility with middlin'-old browsers then you also get to use some of the more established and stable features of HTML5. These haven't been substantially changed in quite a while. In some cases, the traditional alternatives are simply no good. For instance, Flash is going away; it was never available on iOS, it's being phased out on other mobile platforms and, I think, Linux, and I wouldn't give it more than a couple years on Mac and Windows either. So if you want to embed video, the most widely supported option is HTML5 video (well, you still have to encode it twice, once with H.264, once with WebM... but it works in most platforms). It's not a "ratified standard," but it's the closest thing to one we have *ever* had. Flash was never a standard, neither were RealVideo, WindowsMedia or QuickTime. Being conservative when adopting HTML5 features is probably a very good idea; but eschewing it altogether while waiting for final ratification (which admittedly might take more than ten years) is not. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my Nintendo Game Boy. * Added by TagZilla 0.7a1 running on Seamonkey 2.14.1 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
