Re: Extensibility strategies, was: Deciding in public (Was: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)

On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > > If you can make it unnecessary without suffering from other drawbacks,
> > > like chattiness, unreliable disambiguation and unnecessary mapping
> > > problems to other specs, fine.
> > 
> > Using a domain name followed by a hyphen followd by a word seems to 
> > solve all of these simply.
> 
> If a domain name would be sufficient. So how many people within, for 
> instance, Google, would want the ability to mint names, and how would 
> you coordinate them?

A simple registry in a revision control system, probably, or a wiki.


> > > > Why? Are you concerned that people using different dismabiguation 
> > > > schemes would somehow come up with clashing names? How would that 
> > > > happen? Could you give an example?
> > >
> > > Of course that could happen. For instance, when using domain names, 
> > > is the TDL right (URI) or left (Java packages). And so on.
> > 
> > Could you actually give an example where this could happen? I haven't 
> > been able to find a case where an actual clash could happen.
> 
> I'm pretty sure it can easily happen now that new restrictions on new 
> TLDs have been more or less removed.

Could you actually give an example where this could happen? I haven't been 
able to find a case where an actual clash could happen, even with a 
totally open TLD space.


> > Consider that even without any sort of disambiguation mechanic other 
> > than just picking unusual names, Microformats has had no serious 
> > problems with clashes. If you add domain names to the same thing, the 
> > problem really becomes moot.
> 
> The microformats process does not scale. It "works" because it simply 
> rejects proposals that do not look "common" enough, which of course 
> reduces the number of potential clashes significantly.

Microformats scales across the entire Web. That's pretty good as far as I 
can tell. It's not just clases with other Microformats that matter, it's 
clashes across all users of classes.


> That being said, clashes have occurred (what does the "title" class name 
> stand for?), and it's also a known problem that you get in trouble once 
> you want to nest information.

These problems are fixable without complicated disambiguation schemes.


> > > What if you don't have a domain name, and prefer a UUID. Or a URN? 
> > > Or a date-stamped URI (tag: URI scheme)? URIs give you the choice.
> > 
> > class="C4E15D82-61A2-11DD-977B-B4AD55D89593"
> > class="isbn:0674003810"
> > class="ian@hixie.ch,2008-08-03,category"
> > 
> > None of these are ambiguous. They don't even have to use the same 
> > scheme -- since they're all completely opaque, so long as you generate 
> > something that is unambiguous, you will know that it can never clash 
> > with someone else's. No need for URIs.
> 
> I disagree. For instance, an abbreviation such as "isbn" can be 
> ambiguous.

The name wasn't "isbn" it was "isbn:0674003810". But if you think even 
that is too likely to clash, then don't use it, use something you think is 
safer. That's up to you.


> > > > > Again: who is "we" in this case? Certainly not the HTML WG.
> > > >
> > > > So you're in favour of the behaviour seen in the browser wars 
> > > > where people just made up their own tags all the time?
> > > > 
> > > > I am not.
> > >
> > > I am in favor of being able to use new vocabularies without getting 
> > > the WHATWG's or the W3C's approval first. The price for that is that 
> > > I have to put them into a separate namespace, and that is totally 
> > > fine. It works everywhere else.
> > 
> > If the price for that is that you have to use a syntax intended for 
> > this use, which is in a different _syntactic_ space than the 
> > language's main vocabulary, is _that_ an acceptable price?
> 
> Not sure what exactly you mean by "syntactic space". Namespace-qualified 
> elements *are* in a different space, right?

I mean that instead of sticking your extension here:

   <xxxx>

...you stick it here:

   <div class="xxxx">

It's a different syntactic space than the language's main vocabulary. Is 
that an acceptable price?


> Point 2: transformations in general are not required to look for 
> profiles (pointer?). Again, are you mixing up GRDDL (the base spec) with 
> GRDDL use cases for microformats?

If transformations are not required to look for profiles, then ignore my 
second point. Problem solved.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 4 August 2008 17:45:57 UTC