Georg, I think the decision has more to do with maximising the expectation that your design will appear the same on any browser than to do with the features that are available. Also allowing that expectation to continue as standards and browsers move forward and browsers implement standards more fully.
This being achieved by conforming to W3C specifications rather than the whim of each browser developer. In an ideal future we would have left behind browsers and browser versions that relied on Quirks mode behaviours, and no hacks or workarounds would be needed to display pages on different user agents. That may be a way off yet, but I don't see it happening at all unless we take the first steps in that direction. So I try to use standards mode whenever I can (which for me tends to be almost all of the time). Practical implications of that are that on our i18n site XHTML 1.0 pages that are served as text/html are normally uploaded without the xml declaration but in utf-8*. [btw: The links at the bottom of http://www.w3.org/International/articles/serving-xhtml/ lead you to usefully detailed descriptions of differences between Standards and Quirks modes on Mozilla, Opera, and IE.] RI * An XML declaration is required for an XML document if the encoding of the document is other than UTF-8 or UTF-16 and the encoding is not provided by a higher level protocol, ie. the HTTP header. (For more about the implications of this on character encoding choices see http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/ ============ Richard Ishida W3C contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ W3C Internationalization: http://www.w3.org/International/ Publication blog: http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/ > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gunlaug S�rtun > Sent: 15 April 2005 11:52 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [WSG] Quirks mode vs Standards mode > > John Britsios wrote: > > When a document begins with an <?xml version="1.0" > encoding="utf-8"?> > > declaration. IE 6 for Windows doen't see the Doctype, so it lapses > > into "quirks mode". > > > > Therefore I would suggest you not to use it. > > Might you be kind enough to tell me what IE6 has to offer in > standard mode that it doesn't have in quirks mode -- apart > from <http://www.w3.org/International/articles/serving-xhtml/> this? > > I'm asking because after 2 years of studies on the subject, I > still haven't found anything useful in IE6' "standard" mode, > but I may have missed something. > > seriously > Georg > -- > http://www.gunlaug.no > ****************************************************** > The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ > > See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > for some hints on posting to the list & getting help > ****************************************************** > ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
