Do you have some sort of difficulty in grasping the concept of doing
something differently IN THE FUTURE? Not now. Not the immediate future. Not
soon. Not until support is there.
"In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of
Judaea,
And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."
OK, I'm grasping this concept. But who the hell Bjoern Hoehrmann is to
make the whole Internet community to follow and to obsolete 8 years of
practice as "praying to wrong gods"? I may grasp the concept that back
in 2001 he had a vision on the wall: "Behold and perceive: there is no
type but application/javascript". I may also grasp that ever since he
was harassing IETF with I-Ds (expiring every year by protocol) until
finally they gave up on RFC for him. I'm still not grasping though why
a desire of a single person should override everything. I have nothing
against of Bjoern Hoehrmann personally - shall be health and
prosperity on him. But technically he did not invent anything publicly
useful for a normal RFC like "here is the new stuff, if you like it
then better to use it in this way". Instead he just came to say that
"all what you were doing is wrong, here is the right way to do it
because I'm saying so". And as no one can find his name in the book,
anyone is in right to ask this simple question: "Who the hell you are,
Mr. Hoehrmann?"
Yes, historically type="text/javascript" has nothing to do neither
with Content-Type response header nor with <scriptelement. It was
introduced in Netscape 4.0 for <styleattribute together with the
proposed dual CSS structure. It is out of use for many years by now so
I'm reminding that in Netscape 4.x one could use two syntax for style
rules:
1) the regular (now) CSS syntax:
<style type="text/css">
a {
font-weight: "bold";
text-decoration: "none";
}
</style>
2) JavaScript-like syntax:
<style type="text/javascript">
tags.A.fontWeight="bold";
tags.A.textDecoration="none";
</style>
It had nothing to do with <scriptwhere "language" attribute remained
with important distinction of values "JavaScript" and "JavaScript1.2".
It had nothing to do neither with Content-Type of any kind: "type"
attribute was of the same kind as "type" in form controls. The second
syntax did not fly and it was not in extensive use even during the
Browser Wars. The reason is the same as in many other Netscape 4.x
troubles: inability to manipulate style rules at runtime. In either
case it was applied once and forever on page load. The idea itself of
using script capabilities in style rules was good: Microsoft
implemented it later in IE5 using expressions. There are still content
generating libraries in use with dual CSS support for Netscape 4.0
inside. Because careless admins did not go away neither :-) from time
to time one may notice strange types on served pages like <style
type="text/javascript"The most "sound" from recent ones is Google
front page last year. That's getting OT though...
Anyway, when W3C were preparing HTML 4.0, they were on "typization"
campaign: each element has to be typed. In W3C everything seems go by
compain: "everything with type, everything in XML, everything has to
start with X in its name". :-)
"text/javascript" was not related with <scriptelement but i) it was
still related with JavaScript as such and ii) it was known to public.
So the choice was made for <script type="text/javascript"in the
final Recommendation. At the same time meaning transfer was made: it
was stated that element's "type" attribute corresponds to Content-Type
response header - which it never did neither before nor after.
As of now - year 2007 - things are as they are, and who cares what did
something mean to ancestors? For us it means that and we are reading
it in this way. Good enough.
