On 14 Oct 2009, at 11:06, Remco wrote:
2. Use <legend>, and don't expect to be able to use it in any
browsers
sanely for a few years.
3. Use <dt>/<dd>, and don't expect to be able to use it in old
versions
of IE without rather complicated and elaborate hacks for a few
years.
I am not convinced of the wisdom of #4. I prefer #2 long term, but
I see
the argument for #3.
So what you'd expect is that #3 would take about 4 years to completely
fix itself, and #2 would take about 5 years. With such a small
difference, I'd just choose the best option in the long term.
Option #2 affects every major browser currently on the market (i.e.
it's broken) - I'm excluding betas. That's Opera, Firefox, IE, Safari
& Chrome.
Option #3 only affects IE7 and below - which is 30+% of the market,
but at the very least IE8 has it right - which means that (I would
hope) future versions of IE won't have this bug.
I'd be amazed if IE7 is flushed out of the major market share (20%
since Firefox is around that mark) within 5 years (personally I'm
expecting to be around for longer) - rather than amazed, going by the
growth rates (of other browsers), I'm saying it won't happen.
So to say that *all* the browsers that we currently have are going to
be down to a insignificant market share, that we can sensibly use
legend is going to much more than 5 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
With that in mind, and having to choose the lesser of two evils
(though semantically I know which I prefer), option #3 is the only
sensible choice if you want authors to use these elements in a
reasonable amount of time.
Remy Sharp.
