- From: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>
- Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:54:58 +0200
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- CC: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Sam Ruby <rubys@us.ibm.com>, "'HTML WG'" <public-html@w3.org>
Julian Reschke 2008-08-01 17.46: > Henri Sivonen wrote: >>> What distributed extensibility gives us is disambiguation. But that >>> doesn't mean that things won't get peer review. >> >> Would we be better off if <canvas> had its Apple origin unambiguosly >> on it for the rest of the existence of the Web? Would the Web platform >> be better if it were <apple:canvas >> xmlns:apple="http://www.apple.com/2004/07/namespaces/webkit/dashboard#"> >> instead of <canvas>? > > Actually, yes. It would allow the W3C to now standardize <canvas> > without having to deal with that legacy. Why can't "namespacing" of new elements be moved out of the actual tag itself and into the HEAD element instead? For example let's say that <greatelement></greatelement> could be enabled via <meta name=element content="org.whatwg.greatelement" > or through "(something better than) @profile". Even the Internet Explorer "HTML 5 shiv" [1] comes to mind as a rough example of how it could work (but I don't say that JavaScript should need to be involved!) A system were one had to write <vendor:tag namespace:vendor-URL> would perhaps lead to lack of peer review, because other vendors would be reluctant towards implementing support for tags which included other vendor's name or namespace directly in the tag. Wheras having an acceptable extension mechanism could increase peer review, as would define method for trying out things. By doing the exension in the HEAD element, we would avoid having <vendor:tags namepsace=URL></vendor:tags> floating around. The advantage of this method would be that the the act of specifying and approving the the tag would be left to W3, which could do so without necessarily changing the name of it. When approved by the W3, authors should stop using the extension mechanism in the HEAD element. In addition, User Agents would be required to *not* use the information in the extension mechanism if the element (or attribute) had been approved by the W3. Validators should display a warning, but not display an error flag, when using un-approved tags. As long as they are introduced via the extension mechanism. Btw, in CSS, there is a "blessed" mechanism for adding new, experimental/vendor spesific "things". According to CSS 2.1, both Opera, Microsoft, Mozilla and non-browser vendors have used this mechanism. The most well known mechanism is to begin the feature with a '-' plus a vendor spesific tag. For example display:-moz-inline-block is known to many. Mozilla has extended this even to CSS selectors. Thus :-moz-any-link{} is a selector that only Mozilla browsers accepts. (Using that method is the only way to serve CSS rule to mozilla browsers only.) When it it is necessary, and works in CSS, then it should also work in HTML. [1] http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-shiv/ -- leif halvard silli
Received on Sunday, 3 August 2008 21:56:57 UTC