Almost-standards mode

In a remarkable show of good sense, Mozilla added the “almost-standards mode” to support XHTML 1.0 Transitional, HTML 4.01 Transitional, and a bothersome IBM system doctype. (See bug 153032, the revised doctype sniffing documentation, and the evolt.org article about this.) For the first time, some of the IBM pages I use daily look perfect. And there was much rejoicing! Too bad this didn’t make 1.0, but 1.0.1 may be good enough.

Standards for standards sake

When is a JavaScript console no longer a JavaScript console? When it becomes the “Error” console. David Baron finally “fixed” Bug 154942 and added a CSS warning message to the console. Having a warning message is helpful. At least now developers will have a clue about what’s wrong. It still feels broken to have quirks mode happily handle “incorrect” MIME types and simply adding a valid doctype will break the page. For the sake of compatibility, I’d think Mozilla should handle some commonly broken, but reasonable, MIME types, such as text/plain. There’s more discussion about this confusing issue in Bug 113399.

I’m gonna miss the JavaScript console if it gets renamed. It has been a good helper for many years. I think I’d rather see a page compliance console like in iCab and keep the JavaScript separate.