Re: Distributed Extensibility

On Aug 4, 2007, at 14:52, Sam Ruby wrote:

> Wow.  What a loaded question.

I'm still not sure if the proposal is about non-browser consuming  
software in private systems only or also about browser consumers on  
the public Web.

> First, I don't see how fb:mobile is any more or any less "private"  
> than canvas.

Canvas was private when it was only for Dashboard. Now that it works  
on the Web, it is no longer private. I think we are lucky that Apple  
didn't use a prefix or a separate namespace for canvas. Otherwise,  
we'd now be stuck with a prefix or a separate namespace for backwards  
compat.

As far as I can tell, fb:mobile today is specific to communicating  
with the Facebook engine. It isn't about communicating to whatever  
app happens to issue an HTTP GET. That seems private to me.

> Second, I don't even know where to begin with "cannot be trusted to  
> use XML".

Those questions were not opposition to you proposal but attempts to  
elicit more information about what it is that it being proposed and  
why. I can guess that the premise behind the proposal may be that XML  
is too hard. (And I don't necessarily disagree.) But instead of  
making guesses and then continuing from my own guesses, I'm  
interested in what your premises behind the proposal are.

> Let me pose a question.  If Apple had decided that the canvas tag  
> could only be used inside of XHTML pages, what affect would that  
> have had on the adoption rate of that feature?

Of course that would have had an adverse effect on adoption.

I have a feeling that you see my questions as opposition that needs  
to be answered with a counter-question. I'm trying to find out what  
the premises of your proposal are. I still don't know what the  
premises are.

>> So the tokenizer handling of CDATA syntax would change depending  
>> on whether the application layer knows about the kind of element  
>> that is the current node on the tree builder layer at the  
>> particular moment?
>
> "application layer"?  No.  One can determine such factors as "does  
> the name of the target parent element contain a colon" without  
> needing to reference the hosting application.

Sorry about being thick, but I'm still not sure what changes you are  
suggesting to CDATA tokenization.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Saturday, 4 August 2007 13:59:17 UTC