Richard Ishida wrote:
HTML5 support is already creeping into browsers, eg. the <meta
charset="..."/> tag seems to be widely supported [1], but I can see a
point here.
[1] http://www.w3.org/International/tests/results/results-html5-charset
It's not a particularly important issue but I'll mention it anyway:
<meta charset> was actually supported long before HTML5, e.g. it works
in IE 5.0 (and I think it would work in even older browsers if I had any
to test in).
Some people (about 0.1% of web pages today) write <meta
http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-1> (failing
to put quotes around the 'content' attribute value, resulting in an
accidental 'charset' attribute). I would guess the history is that some
browser supported that syntax (perhaps because it had a dumb pre-parse
scanner that just looked for the bytes "charset="), and the others
either independently implemented the bug or else had to copy it for
compatibility with sites that worked in the other browser.
So HTML5 didn't cause any implementation changes - it just recognised
that implementations already supported the charset attribute, and made
it into valid syntax since it's backward-compatible and easier to write.
(But there are plenty of other areas where HTML5 is already moving (and
(subjectively) more vigorously than "creeping") into browsers - see
<http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Implementations_in_Web_browsers>.)
--
Philip Taylor
[email protected]
