On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:41:15 +0100, Mihai Sucan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
The tutorials will just say "Use <!DOCTYPE html>".
Those are the tutorials for beginners. I was talking about advanced
tutorials, for developers who want to know "gory" details.
Even for advanced developers, the only sensible recommendation would be to
use <!DOCTYPE html>. Description of other possibilities would only be of
historical value.
Actually, the best standards mode available is the only right mode to
work in. The other modes are only supported for backward compatibility
with existing documents.
So, this proposal sounds like "why not make this DOCTYPE switch to an
even stricter standards rendering mode in IE.next? then we can improve
IE without breaking existing sites". What this means, is that people
will create even more modern sites, which will use this new DOCTYPE and
the improved rendering engine (which will never be perfect). It's going
to be a loop: newer sites will rely on the newer rendering mode. So,
with each new version of IE (released every 5-10 years), we will have a
new DOCTYPE, and a new rendering mode?
Not necessarily. For a long time, Microsoft has been in a position where
they benefit from the lack of interoperability with other browsers. They
had no incentive to make their browser standards-compliant. Now times have
changed, and even Microsoft, as far as I understand, is now willing to
improve their standards compliance. So I don't think that the
standards-mode story will repeat -- this happened before due to browser
wars, where interoperability has been broken intentionally.
Instead of using this DOCTYPE switch, I was even thinking of conditional
comments, DOM document property, etc. Yet, other methods only add
complications. If Microsoft considers adding a new rendering mode as a
must, such that it will not break many sites, then this DOCTYPE is an
elegant solution. History will repeat itself, no matter how elegant the
solution might be.
Conditonal comments and similar approaches solve another kind of problem:
how to allow making pages which do the right thing in good browsers but
still function in older browsers. OTOH, the DOCTYPE switch allows the
browser to do the right thing for good pages without breaking the old
pages.
--
Alexey Feldgendler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com
