Re: Suppressed content in HEAD: myth or reality?
Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Wed, 3 May 95 18:01:26 EDT
At 4:08 PM 5/3/95, connolly@w3.org wrote:
>In some circles, the conventional wisdom is "if you find data
>characters anywhere in the <HEAD> element, don't display them in the
>same text window where you show the <body> stuff."
>
>This has been in some versions of the HTML specs for a long time.
>
>I think Mosaic 2.5beta implemented it.
>
>Are folks willing to count on this convention, even though there are a
>lot of browsers out there that don't abide by it? (e.g Mosaic 2.4).
>
>Then, at a larger scope, do all changes to HTML have to be completely
>backward compatible, or do we have any faith in format negociation and
>down-translation?
>
>If we don't believe in format negociation, then all style info has
>to go in attributes. We can never add a new block element.
I'm not sure if we _want_ to rely on this convention, but if we do, now
would be a good time to make it explict in the HTML 2.0 spec (with a
warning that it has not been universal in the past).
Also, we might want to say "don't display data characters found in
unrecognized container tags in <HEAD>".
A counter-argument is that it might make rendering of documents without an
explicit <HEAD></HEAD> tricky.
I don't have much faith in format negotiation or down-translation, but I
might be willing to live with two mechanisms for style: <LINK> for
backward-compatibility something else foe in-line style.
---
Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu