Two from Ajaxian

April 12th, 2007

Two from Ajaxian I wanted to point out:

First is a proposal for the W3C to adopt the WHATWG HTML5 effort rather than start from scratch. It makes sense, though I imagine there will be political ramifications. The comments are excellent, but I like what Simon Willison said in response to the comment, "Mozilla, Opera, and Apple should decrease the tolerance for invalid markup in their browsers…":

Because breaking millions of existing pages is a great idea.

Great way to test one's loyalty to a browser, "Oh, I have to completely re-write all 3,456 pages at our web site in the next two days. But it's worth it to support Firefox."

And Lightbox 2 is out! This is an excellent, small, self-contained JavaScript application to provide photo expansion in-page, and which now includes pseudo slideshow capability. I have my own homegrown, but if you use a lot of photos at your site, I can recommend this application.

Comments
1
Lawrence Krubner - 9:59 am 4/13/2007

I wish I understood why this was a great idea:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

How does the browser know how to render the page if the doctype doesn't specify HTML or XHTML?

I do hope the process that develops HTML 5 is a clear one, and they don't make a bunch of decisions that are incomprehensible.

2
Anne van Kesteren - 3:55 pm 4/13/2007

XHTML or HTML has been decided by the MIME type of the page for years. A DOCTYPE is solely relevant for triggering standards mode, which is what the above DOCTYPE does.

3
Lawrence Krubner - 4:49 pm 4/13/2007

Sorry, I should have written "How does the browser know how to render the page if the doctype doesn't specify which version HTML or XHTML is in use?"

"Standards mode" would mean different things, depending on what version is in use. I assume, from what you've said, that its been agreed that the above doctype is a short hand for HTML version 5?

4
Anne van Kesteren - 12:00 am 4/14/2007

It doesn't mean different things for HTML and "XHTML". HTML doesn't have versioning except for the aforementioned standards / almost standards / quirks mode thingie. XHTML with an HTML MIME type is simply tag soup in browsers.

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the discussion. Comments are now closed, but you can contact the author of the post directly.

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