Nove a staré verze specifikací

Dnes mne zaujal e-mail Ian Hicksona zabývající se vztahy mezi verzemi specifikací. Tento spot je jen několik citací, které by neměly zapadnout (můžete si místo něj stejně tak přečíst i celý původní e-mail).

Do you really mean to suggest that once HTML 5 is done, there will never be a need to produce XHTML 1.1 documents or process documents according to that spec's requirements for UAs?


Exactly. The intend is for the HTML5 spec's requirements to be a complete superset of the XHTML 1.x, HTML 2, HTML3.2, HTML4, DOM1 HTML, and DOM2 HTML specs' requirements, and for the language to be a better version such that there should be no good reason to prefer an older language or API version over the one now defined.

This specification is intended to replace (be the new version of) what was previously the HTML4, XHTML 1.x, and DOM2 HTML specifications.

The relationship between HTML5 and XHTML 1.x and HTML 4 is the same as the relationship between DOM2 HTML and DOM1 HTML, or CSS2 and CSS1. The more recent version of the spec completely supplants the earlier version. You would never need to write a CSS1 stylesheet, or use the DOM1 HTML specification when referring to the DOM HTML APIs.

It implies that being a conforming HTML 4.x or XHTM 1.x document processor is irrelevant, but replacing those specs doesn't stop those specs from existing. You can implement CSS1 without miplementing CSS2, but CSS2 obsoletes CSS1, even if it doesn't say it explicitly.

Zajímavý pohled na verze specifikací přináší i Adamův příspěvek CSS 2 ještě stále není hotové. A ve stejném duchu se ptám. Myslí si některý ze čtenářů tohoto blogu, že HTML4 je hotové?