4 ms·

Sorry, can't dig up a source. It's the explanation I've heard for IE Classic's handling of head elements.

• dragonwriter 13y ago
  From a little research, it seems that that explanation is wrong (it sounds like a web dev urban legend dramatizing the "patents mess up everything on the internet" meme). A 1993 draft spec for HTML [1] specifies the ability to include the elements that spec specified as HEAD and BODY elements free floating within the HTML without HEAD and BODY was required of parsers to support "old style documents" using "deprecated" HTML syntax. This tells us two things: 1) The "support TITLE outside of HEAD" behavior was a necessary to support legacy documents in 1993, before Netscape (as the Mosaic Communications Corporation) was founded in 1994, and 2) The HEAD element itself existed before Netscape was founded in 1994. This both provides a more likely explanation for the behavior than any Netscape patent and illustrates that it is unlikely that Netscape could have patented the element in any case. [1] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
  • flomo 13y ago
    Thanks for the additional research and of course that makes perfect sense. I shall stop spreading that urban legend.