On Mar 2, 2010, at 12:41, Markus Ernst wrote:
> I apologize for the case this is a stupid suggestion: Could the spec say that
> the default for HTML5 is no border, but UAs are encouraged to render linked
> images in documents with pre-HTML5 or no doctypes with a border?
Taking your suggestion literally would mean introducing a fourth layout mode in
addition to quirks, limited quirks (aka. almost standards) and standards. The
modes are enough implementation trouble as they are, so I wouldn't support
adding a new one.
What about making the standards mode borderless by default but making the
quirks mode have the border by default? This would be historically consistent.
The purpose of the quirks mode is to cater for late 1990s authoring practices
and the reason to have the default border is to avoid changing the appearance
of pages from the 1990s. (In the past decade, authors haven't been able to rely
on the default border either way, because the default browser on Mac for at
least the past decade--first Mac IE 5 and then Safari--hasn't had the default
border.)
Still, I wouldn't support a mode-based divergence here. I think it's safe to
assume that the same people who have control over the doctype also have control
over page-wide style rules. The already is a page-wide precise toggle for the
border behavior: img { border: 0; }. I think that, in retrospect, especially
considering the difference between the almost standards mode and the standards
mode, making style/layout characteristics depend on the doctype is a worse
solution that having a targeted CSS-based toggle (see
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/almost-precedent/).
More to the point, having a toggle of any kind for this behavior wouldn't solve
the problem that I'm interested in solving by not having a default border. My
primary concern isn't that authors who control the entire page have to include
an additional incantation (img { border: 0; }). My concern is that the default
border makes copy-pasteable HTML fragments unnecessarily crufty, because the
providers of these fragments feel compelled to zap the border regardless of the
toggles in the target document.
Currently, the <style>img { border: 0; }</style> toggle is available, but
providers of fragments still include border="0" or style="border: 0;". If there
were also a doctype toggle, fragment providers would still probably resort to
crufty markup.
(Yes, I realize that to get rid of the cruft, both Firefox *and IE* would need
to change and old version of both of them would need to fade.)
--
Henri Sivonen
[email protected]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
