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

You can't version the web

Posted Jul 31, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)
In reply to: You can't version the web by Velmont
Parent article: WHATWG severs collaboration with W3C on HTML

Are you telling me that the DOCTYPE declaration at the top of a page doesn't do anything? I thought the whole point was that a doc said what spec it was written to and the browser rendered it in that way. But then I got left behind shortly after HTML3.2 and have no clue how the web works any more - it seems awfully complicated and mostly written in javascript rather than HTML.

I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that there is no such thing as a fixed 'HTML 5 spec' you can write pages to. I'm also surprised tha said spec isn;t already finished - I thought people were using it already, but apprently that's all just 'pre-release' versions, with the concomittant issues when the final spec changes.

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You can't version the web

Posted Aug 1, 2012 11:01 UTC (Wed) by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193) [Link]

In theory, a document with a DOCTYPE declaration claims to be valid HTML, but this doesn't help you in practice because there are too many pages out there that consist of the all-too-common tag soup and have the DOCTYPE anyway for purely cargo-cult reasons.

"Why do so many pages have a DOCTYPE?"
"Dunno."
"Let's add it too, just to be sure that the HTML gods do not get angry."

You can't version the web

Posted Aug 5, 2012 8:00 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

Which is an easily solvable problem going ahead. If next time they introduce a DOCTYPE, have Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple/webkit agree that it does not render if it's not valid. At that point, no web designer can simply slap a new DOCTYPE on old crap.

You can't version the web

Posted Aug 5, 2012 9:01 UTC (Sun) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

I don't think that's true. That would mean they also have to agree on all the little bugs in the rendering engines :-)

Otherwise, what will happen is that one browser has a bug and accepts something wrong, and then the others will be forced to also accept that because the fix won't be deployed quickly enough.

You can't version the web

Posted Aug 5, 2012 9:10 UTC (Sun) by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193) [Link]

Such pages would render in old browsers, so the first new browser release would break them. I cannot see any browser vendor agreeing to this.