Ian Hickson wrote:
On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Sam Ruby wrote:
Case in point:
http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/12/01/The-White-Pebble
In IE, there's some stray "XHTML HTML" and "XHTML HTML XML" text. This
isn't acceptable to most people. It certainly isn't something that it
would make sense to encourage. The worst possible outcome here would
be for browsers like IE to start trying to parse this "SVG" in
text/html, because the lack of any sensible parsing rules for it would
guarentee that we're faced with even more "tag soup", thus undoing all
the work that the HTML5 spec is trying to do to get us past that.
You are aware that I like to "tweak" IE users, right?
With the current technology, this could have been avoided with a single
div and two lines of CSS. And I am most capable of doing that.
But that wouldn't help, e.g., Lynx users.
Over a period of years, I would think that a requirement like the one
below could be phased in (presuming that one could be found to work). I
have no expectation that Lynx would ever support a real XHTML mode.
In the longer run, I do believe that an architected simple rule like:
xmlns attributes are invalid on HTML elements except html, and
when found on unrecognized attributes imply style="display:none"
unless you recognize the value of this attribute.
... would channel those with insane desires to make extensions into
doing so in a manner that is harmless. Such a rule might take a year or
two to get widely deployed, but the worst feet-draggers won't be
affected any worse than they were in the days when <table> was young.
There are millions of documents that would be "broken" by such a rule,
so browser vendors couldn't actually deploy that, sadly. :-(
Can you identify three independently produced ones?
BTW, I deeply respect the pushback that you give to everybody who thinks
they want to have a say in the future of HTML.
- Sam Ruby
