- From: Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com>
- Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 11:08:46 +0100
- To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
- CC: Michael.Kay@softwareag.com
[ addition to http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2003Feb/0024.html and http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2003Feb/0029.html ] 1. Why have only one namespace declaration, on the root element? Here are some test results demonstrating the requirement: files: http://www.pinkjuice.com/temp/xhtml/multi_decl.xhtml http://www.pinkjuice.com/temp/xhtml/single_decl.xhtml results: http://www.pinkjuice.com/temp/xhtml/results.txt I think XSLT 2.0 could and should offer a feature which allows authors to specify that they want only one namespace declaration, on the root element, and allows them to rely on it, so that their "HTML compatible XHTML" can work in older browsers and in popular validators. 2. Why have a namespace declaration at all? When the XHTML document gets opened locally (not over http), then namespace-aware browsers like Mozilla need it to recognize the thing as HTML (XHTML). From my experience, the http-equiv meta element does not suffice in all scenarios. So having this one namespace declaration helps. And it doesn't do any harm either for the browsers an validators I support. "HTML compatibility" is not something absolute. By (conceptual, historical, abstract, big picture) definition, XHTML is a subset of HTML (grammar is the same: HTML4; syntax/notation is a subset: XML of SGML), but in reality, it isn't. So until browsers etc properly support XHTML (served as application/xhtml+xml), we can choose to go with a temporary workaround named "HTML compatibility". http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines is not normative, and could not be. So each developer has to find the best compromise for each scenario with its specific set of requirements. Some of these solutions to achive maximum backwards- and forwards- compatibility include one namespace declaration. BTW, the example in Appendix C http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines has a single one : <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" Tobi -- http://www.pinkjuice.com/
Received on Friday, 14 February 2003 05:09:52 UTC