- From: Simon Pieters <zcorpan@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:03:39 +0200
- To: www-smil@w3.org
Prior SMIL specs have introduced many namespaces:
http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/03/smil
It seems that SMIL 3.0 adds at least 63 more to this list:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-modules.html#smilModulesNSSMIL21ModuleXMLNamespace
It says that:
The XML namespace identifier for the complete set of SMIL 3.0 modules,
elements and attributes, are contained within the following namespace:
http://www.w3.org/2007/07/SMIL30/
...but this is not correct. Namespaces in XML are opaque strings. [1] The
following are all completely different elements:
<smil xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/07/SMIL30/"/>
<smil xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/07/SMIL30/AccessKeyTiming"/>
You are effectively forcing implementors to ignore the namespace
altogether or use some other means that to deal with the 174 different
namespaces in SMIL. As I understand it, it's also effectively impossible
to write a RELAX NG schema for SMIL 3.0 because it uses multiple
namespaces.
It is not appropriate to have several namespaces for the same language.
Even with a new version of a language, if it is intended to be backwards
compatible (work in UAs that only support an older version of the
language) it should use the same namespace. XHTML has only one namespace.
SVG has only one namespace. MathML has only one namespace. And so forth.
Given that there already are 111 different namespaces for SMIL prior to
SMIL 3.0, I would suggest that SMIL 3.0 clears this up by introducing one
new namespace that is to be used for all future revisions of SMIL:
http://www.w3.org/ns/smil
...and use a separate attribute to deal with module identifiers (e.g.
module="AccessKeyTiming") if necessary.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/#NSNameComparison
--
Simon Pieters
Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 16:03:54 UTC