On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 08:01:50PM -0600, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:
I would suggest staying with HTML4; it is upwards compatible in that an
HTML5 parser should generally be able to read it, and the HTML4 DOCTYPE
actually declares a version, instead of the "eternal now" HTML5 uses. That
may be suitable for shiny Web apps that change day-by-day and are always
loaded from the cloud, but an actual fixed version is much better for
documentation, which may be read from an archive years from now. There will
be no question as to the correct interpretation of an HTML4 document, ever,
while HTML5's versionless declaration leaves open future questions of "now
which version of HTML5 is this?".
Actually, we do not output perfect HTML4, and bad HTML5.
As a side note, there is an html3.2 init file, but it is not up to date,
and I do not think that it would be interesting to invest much time in
this file. Nowadays, it is mostly used to check that it is still
possible to do the kind of customizations required for baxward
compatibility.