Stylesheets - Re: Does IE have the same problems with XHTML 1.0 Transitional as

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Re: Does IE have the same problems with XHTML 1.0 Transitional as

Alan J. Flavell

2006-02-24, 10:22 am

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006, Alan Silver wrote:

>
> Can someone please just clarify that this is in fact correct, just
> to reassure me!! Thanks

Just how hard was it to do a search of the archives for discussions of
quirks v. standards mode, and find references to one or other of
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ and
http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch.html

Of course the whole concept is bogus; but it's what's happening, so,
bogus or not, we have little choice than to use it.

Eric B. Bednarz

2006-02-24, 10:22 am

David Dorward <dorward@yahoo.com> writes:

> Alan Silver wrote:

(Alan Flavell wrote [about doctype sniffing]:)

>

In every way.
[color=darkred]
> The Doctype states which language the document is authored in.

No it does not. It just specifies the document's own, unique formal
grammar (or to say it with /the makers of/, 'The element, entity, and
short reference sets') in its declaration subset and declares the root
element for the following document instance set.

That's one good reason why the whole concept of sniffing for per
definition arbitrary strings is rightout laughable.

--
||| hexadecimal EBB
o-o decimal 3771
--oOo--( )--oOo-- octal 7273
205 goodbye binary 111010111011

Alan J. Flavell

2006-02-24, 10:22 am

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, VK wrote:
>
> Alan Silver wrote:

[about DOCTYPE sniffing...]

>
> Unless I'm totally out of the loop here:- "bogus" means that IE
> doesn't support XHTML and doesn't plan to do it in the any near
> future:

Heavens, no: DOCTYPE sniffing isn't about HTML versus XHTML - it's
about rendering in quirks mode versus standards mode.

At the superficial level, it's bogus to suppose that by inspecting
some details of an author's DOCTYPE, one could deduce whether he wants
his web page to be taken seriously as standard HTML+CSS, or just
treated as an attempt to do visual DTP relying on the (known and
unknown) misbehaviours of old and buggy browsers - nowadays most
particularly MSIE.

It's doubly-bogus that the quirks v. standards heuristic test is done
on the DOCTYPE in the HTML, whereas quirks v. standards has most of
its *effect* on the interpretation of CSS, not of HTML.

It's kind of sad that when MSIE was originally introduced, it
attempted to emulate the known bugs of the then-available Netscape
version, whereas nowadays the Mozilla folks have wasted a substantial
amount of time and effort on emulating the known bugs of later
versions of MSIE. A pity they couldn't just have concentrated on
implementing to specifications, considering all the things that are
in the specifications but still waiting to be implemented.

At a deeper level, the supposition that the DOCTYPE even declares
which "version" of HTML the author thought they were using, is
fundamentally flawed. It doesn't matter, and 99.9% of readers won't
want to know or care, but the matter is examined in depth (and this is
an answer to David Dorward's apparent misconception about this
underlying principle) in an article linked from the already-cited
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ , namely
http://groups.google.com/group/comp...3e53dee2c152a81

No offence meant to David - it's a very popularly held misconception,
indeed in practical terms it really doesn't have any impact on us as
web authors. But nevertheless, as it says there (written in 1998,
in an SGML context, of course):

___
/
Have I made my point? DOCTYPE declarations tell you nothing about the
class of documents of which a document is a member. Nothing.
[...]
This means that there is a BIG PROBLEM: for the last 10 years,
something we thought we were doing turns out to not be that at all.
We have all been living a lie for the last 12 years.
\___

And he goes on to discuss Architectural Forms - which XML tossed
aside, and later re-invented in a different way. But I digress.

Alan J. Flavell

2006-02-24, 10:22 am

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, VK wrote:

> Alan J. Flavell wrote:
>
> Right.
>
> An important notice though: DOCTYPE by itself is *nothing*
> whatsoever:

There's the difference between what it *is*, and what it *gets used
for*.

What it *is*, is defined by SGML, in theory. But in practical terms
it gets used for something else altogether. And that's why DOCTYPE
sniffing is being characterised as "bogus" - no matter that we need to
use it in practice, since this bogosity seems to have been widely
adopted.

>
> It did not!

(Does not parse.)

> Until IE 6.0 DTD at the top of page was an equivalent of supporter
> sign on your jaket during the election campain.

Again you're confusing the question of what it /is/, with what it gets
(or got) used for.

> But it may affect significally on the page appearance for 60%-90% of
> your visitors.

Visual appearance is no concern of SGML :-}

As I said before - this *SGML* feature is being (mis)used in *HTML* in
order to influence a browser's interpretation of *CSS*. That's at
least *double* bogosity, if not multiple. Still, we have no
alternative in practice than to follow it, no matter how bogus we may
consider it to be.