You can't version the web [LWN.net]

You can't version the web

Posted Jul 28, 2012 22:13 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: You can't version the web by Velmont
Parent article: WHATWG severs collaboration with W3C on HTML

> Browsers do not implement HTML+, HTML2, HTML3.2 HTML4, HTML4.01, etc, as separate versions. They all just have a single implementation that covers all these versions at once.
Yeah, sure. Pay no attention to all these "if (is_html4.2)" statements inside the source code.

Browsers indeed usually have a single implementation of layout engine, because even a single implementation is overwhelmingly complex. Having several implementations would be impossible to maintain.

And they're getting even more complex. We now have CSS-based tables, flexible layouts and so on. Except that they all work like shit.

I maintain that it's impossible to create a moderately complex fully flexible layout using div+css without using either fixed pixel (em, percentage) sizes or JavaScript.

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