Re: ISSUE-41/ACTION-97 decentralized-extensibility

Jonas Sicking On 09-10-01 10.02:

> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
>> Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>> ...
>>> I'm not actually a big fan of this proposal. Experience with
>>> namespaces in XML has showed (at least to me) that namespaces are too
>>> complex for authors to understand. The most recent example of this was
>>> the discussion on RDFa+HTML where it was clear that even the experts
>>> that developed RDFa thought of nodes as receiving their meaning from
>>> their nodeName rather than from their localName+namespaceURI.
>>> ...
>> Pointer?
> 
> This is one example:
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Sep/0923.html
> 
> But really, the whole thread is filled with missunderstandings about
> how namespaced nodes in the DOM work.


Ian said[1]: "CSS selector indirection is already pretty confusing 
to a lot of authors, but [...] selectors can be written by trial 
and error without the use of tools beyond a browser, and it's not 
a rebindable prefix mechanism."

Here Ian in fact gave good reasons for why the Microsoft proposal 
is likely to work: We have CSS. And authors will need to style 
those namespaced elements via CSS to get them to display 
correctly. Thus they need to learn about namespaces in HTML as 
well as in CSS.

There is no wonder that authors have not learned namespaces when 
all pages are served as text/html and text/html hitherto hasn't 
had namespace support.

Btw, I would encourage Microsoft to supply their proposal with 
some demo pages.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7670#c6
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Thursday, 1 October 2009 12:25:47 UTC