Re: HTML 5 and Distributed Extensibility

Hello all,

On Sep 25, 2007, at 2:53 PM, Peter Krantz wrote:

>
> On 9/25/07, David Orchard <dorchard@bea.com> wrote:
>>
>> The TAG has reviewed the proposal in
>> http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/08/02/HTML5-and-Distributed- 
>> Extensibility.
>>  In short, we believe it is a very interesting start of a proposal  
>> for
>> stronger support for distributed extensibility on the web in the HTML
>> language.
>
> I am not sure I understand the full implications of the referenced
> proposal yet. What is the purpose of extending HTML 5 with custom
> elements? Can it be solved with RDFa which is on the agenda for
> inclusion in HTML 5 or is there a need for both?

On this issue, I did start a rather sparse wiki page [1]. As I said  
Its rather sparse now. It would be good to better document how IE  
handles namespaces with HTML. I do not necessarily think we should  
limit ourselves to the IE approach, but it would be good to  
understand what support IE has now. The other browsers already have  
some namespace support for XHTML so it could be some low-hanging  
fruit to bring namespace support to HTML.

As for RDF, this strikes me as just another namespace we want to  
support in HTML: a list that seems to grow as we discuss these  
issues. Allowing the same support of extensibility that XML already  
has would be the obvious way to handle this. It may be that browsers  
do not necessarily bring special handling support for certain  
namespaces, but simply having the mechanism to include and even  
ignore other namespaces would be a big improvement.

There has been some discussion of the difficulties with namespace  
URIs and hard-coding certain prefixes. I think hard-coding prefixes  
could be a good thing as long as their understood as a part of a  
broader namespace extensibility mechanism (like "XML" and "XMLNS").  
By hard-coding it would allow authors to omit certain namespace  
bindings such as RDF, ARIA,, SVG, XForms, MathML, etc. (in addition  
to XML and XMLNS that are already hard-coded). This could even be  
made to apply to the XML serialization of HTML5.

Take care,
Rob

[1]: <http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/DistributedExtensibility>

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2007 02:40:04 UTC