Rendering Modes

In Almost Target Eric Meyer brings up “almost standards mode” (limited quirks mode in HTML 5) and compares it with the stuff Internet Explorer 8 brings us. It is true that the browsers not named Internet Explorer have four modes: quirks, almost standards, and standards mode for text/html content and the XML mode for XML content. However, contrary to what Microsoft proposes these modes have a small set of specific differences, mostly visible in CSS parsing and CSS layout. This means that all of these modes evolve. The new HTML 5 canvas element works in all of them. Selectors Level 3 works in all of these modes. These modes are all but stagnating the Web. They are historical accidents due to the right way of doing standardization for the Web wasn’t entirely figured out just yet. (That came later starting with CSS 2.1.) Again, they are vastly different from the anti-competitive measures Internet Explorer 8 introduces.

Henri Sivonen goes into some more detail on the “almost standards mode” issue in Almost Precedent.

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