----- Original Message -----
From: "J. King" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Andrew Fedoniouk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "www-html" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] HTML syntax: shortcuts for 'id' and 'class' attributes
On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:46:13 -0500, Andrew Fedoniouk
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ian, what does this "backward compatibility" mean?
I can't speak for what Hixie considers backwards compatible, but I can
tell you why a construct should as that which you're suggesting is not
backwards compatible: A start tag such as <p.myclass> would produce a
"p.myclass" element, not a "p" element as one would want to have. This is
true for every element type, so any document that used this construct in a
majority or (horror of horrors) all of its element start-tags would have a
document cmnposed of elements entirely unknown to an HTML4 UA. This is
unacceptable, especially considering the nominal gain.
So in your interpretation backward compatibility of HTML5 means that
HTML5 must be a subset of HTML4. That is not general intention I beleive.
I understand motivation to keep HTML5 as close as possible to HTML4 (but not
to XHTML?)
thus to have reasonable, say, interoperability. Thus I think statement
"backward compatibility" needs to
be reformulated. At least everybody shall have clear idea of what "backward"
means.
Andrew.
