On 27 Jan 2008, at 14:22, DAVOUD TOHIDY wrote: > > on Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:22:38 Philippe Wittenbergh wrote: > >> 'The standards' (and the doctypes) were not written with differences >> in 'rendering' in mind. > > is this what you know or you believe? is there anything documented > about this statement?
DOCTYPE sniffing was introduced with IE6 (release 2001). HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0/1.1 both predate this. HTML 4.01 doesn't say anything about DOCTYPE sniffing in either SGML or XML serialisations. > and how a standard can be written without conducting any research > on how browsers render an x(html) file? When the current (X)HTML RECs were published there were two distinct behaviours: IE with it's non-standard box model (now "quirks" mode), and Netscape 4 (with very, very, very little CSS support). Many (if not most) specifications are written from an idealist point of view of everything following the current standards (HTML 5 and CSS 2.1 are notable exceptions to this). > The following is from Eric's article at: > > http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/index.html?page=2 > > ///// Besides the simple difference that strict documents will be > treated differently, > strict documents will have two big differences from quirky ones. > > First is that all elements will inherit styles, including table > elements, > which have a hard time inheriting text colors and styles in quirky > mode. > > Second is that font-size: medium text will be the same size as > unstyled text. > In quirky mode, unstyled text is the same size as small. ////// > > So what i get from what erics states (which is actually the second > and third > significant examples BTW :) ) in the above statement, is that dtds > prescribe > a particular behaviour. These CSS rendering differences to this day are totally unstandardised. There is only a de-facto behaviour to follow. That said, HTML 5 defines the differences for HTML parsing in the text/html serialisation. > The above is an example of what a dtd sets as a rule and how a > browser acts > based on the set of rules defined by dtds. This has nothing to do > with if a browser > wants to provide web-compatibility or not. The DTD _doesn't_ set any rules regarding rendering. The DTD gives information on how to parse the HTML, nothing more (i.e., get a DOM from the raw data). DOCTYPE switches exist precisely for web compatibility — IE6 introduced them so sites developed for IE's non- standardised box model wouldn't break, while allowing new sites to follow the CSS2 REC. >> Browsers, on the other hand, have, for web-compatibility reasons, >> assigned a particular behaviour for some elements -for a very limited >> number of elements-. The case of the alignment of images in table- >> cells is the most (and only ?) significant example. > > Are you suggesting that it is the browser which defines the standards? > Are you suggesting that it is the browser which decides to assign the > gap for the image not the strict dtd? Yes – go and look through the DTD, you will find nothing to do with rendering at all in it. -- Geoffrey Sneddon <http://gsnedders.com/> ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
