Comments on: IE 8 is platform complete

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:29:37 +0000

@hAl: Depends on who you ask. Surely, their CSS 2.1 implementation is great. But like other implementations, it got some bugs.

I personally think it’s bad that IE 8 still accepts CSS files that are not sent with the text/css media type. That’ll make IE the only browser that has this bug and will have it for the next decade.

IE also continues with the bad habit of restricting the @import rule to 3 levels of nesting.

On the other hand, IE 8 excels in rendering border-collapsed tables. A part of the spec that’s not very well implemented in other browsers.

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.6 on Windows.

By: hAl

hAl — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:06:53 +0000

Any preliminary findings ?
Like a big hole in IE8 css support somewhere ?

Posted using Internet Explorer (Windows) 8.0 on Windows.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:04:16 +0000

I understand your point of view, it’s true that HTML 4.01 is an SGML application. However, for this topic not only technical facts need to be considered.

Technically, browsers should render accroding to the doctype, but they actually render simply what’s implemented. Thus technically, browsers parse HTML 4.01 as SGML and HTML 5 as HTML 5. But actually, browsers parse both HTML 4.01 and 5 as one and the same thing.

HTML 5 defines what HTML 4.01 didn’t when it was already clear that browser vendors won’t implement SGML. And look, only one year ago, the case discussed above had 4 different parse results. Due to HTML 5, all except one engine do the same thing.

IE changed it’s behaviour from totally wrong to SGML-half-wrong. Which is completely inconsistent with decisions like implementing other HTML 5 features.

I don’t really mind it, because it’s an edge case, it simply shows that IE is not yet completely on the right way.

By the way: When the W3C HTML working group decided to base their work of HTML 5 on the Web Applications 1.0 spec, they agreed that

This specification represents a new version of HTML4, [...]. Migration from HTML4 to [...] this specification should in most cases be straightforward, as care has been taken to ensure that backwards-compatibility is retained.

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.6 on Windows.

By: David Hammond

David Hammond — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:54:39 +0000

My test case is correct on the empty attribute feature. It’s testing against the HTML 4.01 standard, which is an SGML language and follows SGML parsing rules. HTML 5 is not an SGML language, and it deviated from SGML on this issue. Browsers should follow the HTML 5 rules on documents deemed to be HTML 5 documents, but they technically should follow the HTML 4/SGML rules on documents with an HTML 4 doctype.

The only “error” here is the fact that the specifications of HTML 4 and HTML 5 demand different parsing rules. Unless the W3C, in a finalized Recommendation, explicitly states that browsers are to use the HTML 5 parsing rules on existing HTML 4 documents, my test case remains correct.

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.5 on Linux.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:52:32 +0000

@hAl: As I said some time ago, I think one test in this testcase is wrong. I’m talking about the tests that looks for an empty attribute to become attr=attr;
Firefox, Safari and Opera have moved their behaviour to HTML5’s definition which says that attr should become attr=”".

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.6 on Windows.