smorgan wrote: > Web standards currently exist, and have for a while. Clearly we want > authors to create pages using standards, as opposed to continuing to > use non-standard pages. Given that, the arguments for and against > quirks mode are essentially: [snip] > Those are very much parallel, and I really don't think I've > misrepresented either case.
There are similarities, but there are also substantial differences. The purpose of quirks mode is "backwards compatibility" with "legacy browsers". [1] There is a large body of html pages that were written a long time ago (by internet-time) and it's unlikely the pages will ever be updated at all (the return on investment would be too low). Acceptable rendering of this legacy content is the primary purpose of quirks. The secondary purpose is acceptable rendering of pages using non-standard features that are in widespread use on the web. In practice, it's unusual that a quirk doesn't meet both criteria -- gecko wouldn't include a legacy behavior if it wasn't widely used and the widespread non-standard behaviors exist primarily because that's what legacy browsers expected. Camino is asserting that they should change the UA to include "Firefox" because some websites have started looking for it (this has probably been slowly growing for a while). The number of sites doing this is very small in comparison to the number of sites delivering pages that gecko interprets in quirks mode. Beyond that, without quirks mode, nobody would use Gecko since there is substantial amount of quirks-mode content out there. Without people using it, there is little incentive to use non-quirks HTML/CSS/JS coding. By implementing quirks mode, Gecko the net effect is an /increase/ in demand for standards-compliant pages (this was Gerv's point). Camino's UA string change would also increase the Camino's user-base. But it /encourages/ webmasters to not check for Camino since even if Camino's user base increased, there would be no reason to not continue checking for "Firefox." And it reinforces the webmasters' broken idea that they should check for Firefox. [1] http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html#layoutmode -- Andrew Schultz [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sens.buffalo.edu/~ajs42/ _______________________________________________ dev-tech-layout mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-layout
