[Bug 7670] Use of prefixes is too complicated for a Web technology

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7670





--- Comment #13 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2009-09-19 02:04:38 ---
> > > How is it relevant whether a specific technology has the same level of
> > > "deployed success"?
> > 
> > If you're trying to work out whether a technology is usable or not, then it
> > being successful or not is a useful indicator.
> 
> Depends on a certain definition of "successful". Is WebDAV successful? Is Atom?
> Is JCR? Is CMIS? Is Docbook? Is XSLT?

It's not a binary question. None of those technologies other than Atom is
hand-authored and as widely deployed as HTML. As far as I am aware, no
technology that uses the anti-pattern described above is as widely used as
HTML. Plenty of other technologies that _don't_ use the anti-pattern _are_,
like CSS, JS, HTTP, DOM, etc.

It's naïve to invent new technologies without learning the lessons from the
failures of past technologies. Outright _denying_ the failures is even worse,
though.

The HTML WG's deliverables are all about learning the lessons from the past
(e.g. realising the importance of backwards compatibility instead of boiling
the oceans like XHTML2 and XForms, being detailed about implementation details
instead of vague like HTML4 and DOM2 HTML, not making technologies too complex
for authors, etc). I would not support this working group publishing a
technology that made as fundamental a mistake as using user-declared
string-bound prefixes to form identifiers.


> Microdata. Ping. And probably lots more I haven't noticed yet.

"Things you don't like" is not the same as "things that rely on design patterns
that we have reason to believe won't succeed". You haven't listed patterns that
those features rely on that would cause those features to fail, you've just
pointed out non-technical reasons you don't like them and places that you
(mistakenly) think they violate other specifications.


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Received on Saturday, 19 September 2009 02:04:50 UTC