Re: What's the problem? "Reuse of 1998 XHTML namespace is potentially misleading/wrong"

Robin Berjon wrote:
> 
> On Feb 11, 2009, at 21:47 , Robert J Burns wrote:
>> However, HTML5 has introduced namespace collisions all on its own so 
>> that things like the 'small' element mean two different things within 
>> the same namespace. In other words a name collision where two separate 
>> elements share the same name. This is the type of thing a namespace 
>> should be avoiding or it ceases to have any meaning.
> 
> I really don't understand your point? Are you saying that elements with 
> different semantics with the same fully qualified name are always bad? 
> So long as they can be distinguished by context, it really doesn't 
> matter. The only thing it breaks is DTD validation and no one sane would 
> ever care about that.
> ...

The problem is that you do not always have context.

For instance, XHTML elements can appear in many other XML documents, 
re-using the document markup semantics. In this case, you frequently 
have a single element, and no context at all.

BR, Julian