Re: several messages about New Vocabularies in text/html

Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote on 04/03/2008 03:24:20 PM:
>
> On Thu, 3 Apr 2008, Sam Ruby wrote:
>
> > I maintain that matching on an attribute named "xmlns" with a value of
"
> > http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" on an element otherwise unknown to HTML5 is

> > an approach that would (a) yield a statistically insignificant number
of
> > false positives, (b) enable us to trigger the transition to a new
state,
> > and (c) would serve as a model for how new vocabularies are to be
> > introduced.
>
> I haven't taken a sample of text/html pages that contain such triggers
> yet, but I _have_ done such a sample for MathML, and it showed that for
> that vocabulary we would need some sort of hardcoded list to handle the
> existing content. (Either a whitelist of MathML elements or a blacklist
of
> HTML elements, but either way we've lost the genericity of the problem
you
> are trying to solve.)

I disagree that for MathML that you have shown that we would need some sort
of hardcoded list.  The most that you have demonstrated is that a hardcoded
list would suffice for a snapshot of the MathML vocabulary taken at this
point in time.

I am confident that such a hard coded list would not work for SVG, not even
for a snapshot of the vocabulary.  I am hopeful that whatever approach you
chose to accept for SVG will also apply to MathML, and will not further
constrain the development of that vocabulary.

- Sam Ruby