Re: [css3-namespace] Last call comments from XHTML2 WG

On Friday 2008-03-28 10:44 -0700, L. David Baron wrote:
> On Friday 2008-03-28 17:11 +0100, Steven Pemberton wrote:
> > A note pointing out that default namespaces alter the way that type 
> > selectors work compared with earlier versions of CSS, and if you want to 
> > avoid that you should always use explicit qualified names would do the 
> > trick.
> 
> But using explicit qualified names is a *really* bad idea, since it
> makes the style sheet depend on specific namespace prefixes being
> used in the document.  We really shouldn't suggest doing that.

Other working group members tell me that I misunderstood your
comment.  I thought you were suggesting that authors should write
selectors like "html\:p", but they say you want authors to write
"html|p".

Which were you suggesting?

However, I don't see how that is any better, given that "html|p"
wouldn't be supported by the older CSS implementations that you're
trying to be compatible with.  So both ways would produce different
results in implementations that don't support css3-namespace.  And
given that the default namespace has a pretty good chance of being
the one that the majority of the nodes are in, having the default
namespace seems likely to minimize the number of node*selector pairs
that produce different matching results.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/