Re: tlug: List of meta's for different languages

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Toshio Oda <craigoda@example.com> writes:

    turnbull> This is exactly what he doesn't want, I think.  He wants
    turnbull> to know what will work with real implementations, as
    turnbull> opposed to conformant implementations.  Netscape and
    turnbull> MSIE have historically been extremely keen to avoid
    turnbull> conformance....

    Craig> Ahhhgg.. This kind of thing makes me sad.

Well, to be fair, their avoidance of conformance has usually been on
the extension side.  (Take a look at either
.../lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/etc/psgml/ or /usr/share/...sgml/dtd
from your Debian sgml-data package).  But it has caused a lot of
headaches.

I think that the heat that Netscrap and MessIE have taken for
non-conformance will probably result in them paying more attention to
the standards in the future.  Also, the fact that HTML is now quite
mature, and has most of the features that content providers want
(notice that frames, tables, and active content=java are all now
standardized, but there's no sign of a math standard yet :-( ).  So
the benefits to nonconformance are relatively small.

They will, unfortunately, continue to be backward compatible with
their own deprecated extensions, I am sure.  Encouraging their
continued use....

And the word "historically" is important in this context.  Older MS
and NS browsers were nonconformant and remain widespread, although
most people do upgrade.  This history matters to Darren, even if all
future MS/NS browsers parse the DTD given by the <!DOCTYPE>
declaration and download the IANA charset list when necessary.

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