Re: Choosing name for XML serialization (Was: Re: HTML5 differences from HTML4 editor's draft (XHTML5 and XHTML2))

On Jun 22, 2007, at 1:58 AM, Jirka Kosek wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
>> I don't think a version attribute would help. In browser-hosted
>> implementations, DOM interfaces and default presentation are based
>> solely on the namespace and tag name, and are not affected by  
>> attributes
>> on the root element. I think this is generally true of non-browser
>> implementations as well. Doing otherwise would be rather problematic.
>
> This is not true. AFAIK the next version of XML Mind XML Editor (which
> visually renders XML documents using CSS) will be able to switch  
> between
> configurations not only based on !DOCTYPEs, namespaces and root  
> element
> name, but also depending on the value of attribute on root element.
>
> http://www.xmlmind.com/pipermail/xmleditor-support/2007-June/ 
> 005420.html
>
> So it is perfectly doable.

I read the message and I don't see how it has anything to do with  
what I said. Please keep in mind that browser-hosted implementations  
allow dynamic creation of elements and insertion in possibly foreign  
namespaces. document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml",  
"input") can only have one result, and it can't decide based on an an  
attribute on the root element what it's going to do because you could  
be calling it on a document where HTML is not even the root language.  
Identifying some notion of "document type" does not help with this  
problem.

In general, people commenting on what is or isn't doable in browsers  
may wish to consider studying some browser code first. There are two  
first-class open source browser engines available for you to read:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Download_Mozilla_Source_Code
http://webkit.org/building/checkout.html

It's also easy to find experts on these code bases who are often glad  
to answer questions for standards experts about how things work.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Friday, 22 June 2007 09:44:04 UTC