Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> XML doesn't "degrade gracefully". One of the whole points of XML is that
> it not "degrade gracefully".

I'm not sure what you mean by this, and although I've spent a lot of time in
the XML community, I've never heard it before. Certainly in data-oriented
XML formats the whole idea is for XML to degrade gracefully (ignore new
stuff). HTML has always followed this rule and I'd hope that XHTML would
continue this even further.

>> Perhaps Mozilla could introduce some sort of comment element for
>> namespaces. Something [...] Similar to the <noscript> hack for
>> JavaScript.
> 
> Emphasis on "hack".
> 
> I'm not saying these are not good ideas -- merely that they move WAY
> beyond the existing specifications and it is therefore not appropriate to
> just implement them. Get the W3C to agree on something, and then you have
> something to get the implementors to do. Until then...

If we only implemented specifications, it would be a very boring world. I
thought that part of the idea of namespaces was that we could implement
things that _weren't_ standardized. Mozilla has certainly done it's share of
standard-stretching to make things easier on its developers, so I don't
understand your reticence to make things easier on your users (web
publishers).

We're certainly not violating any W3C spec by doing what I suggest.

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Monday, 7 May 2001 00:46:36 UTC