On Mon, 9 Dec 1996 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Here is the question as SoftQuad asked it, and Dave Raggett's reply,
> about the significance of order in the HTML HEAD...
Maybe you could forward this reply onto Dave as I don't have his email
address...
> > >>Can Wilbur contain a statement to the effect that user agents must
> > >> not reorder META elements except by explicit request, and that if
> > >> they insert META elements themselves, must put them all after all
> > >> other META elements.
>
> Reply:
>
> > >HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) states:
> > >
> > > The head of an HTML document is an unordered collection of
> > > information about the document.
> > >
> > >It follows that the order of META and LINK elements is unimportant.
> > >This also follows from the equivalence with HTTP, for which the
> > >ordering is defined as unimportant. It would be very hard at this
> > >stage to change HTML in this regard.
The HTML 2.0 spec does indeed say that but it _doesn't_ say that tools
should or should not be able to _re_order META elements; to my mind this
is a different thing. The order of elements in the HEAD fromthe tool that
originally generated the document is arbitrary; you can intersperse LINK,
META, TITLE, and the other HEAD elements in any order. However once that
order is specified in an HTML document instance it should be preserved, as
changing the order changes the parse tree and thus changes the document
(and in the case of multi-line metadata, it can change the semantics as
well).
So keep the unordered collection of elements in the head but disallow
future processors from changing the order once a document is created
without informing the user. Or at least make it explicit that reordering
is permitted and put us out of our misery. But the current wording just
seems ambiguous to me (and obviously others seeing as this discussion has
rolled on for months now).
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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