Re: Extensibility strategies, was: Deciding in public (Was: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)

On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
> But Ian found another loophole.  A much bigger one.  I hadn't said that 
> usability was a requirement.

So the class="" attribute solution _doesn't_ address your requirements? Or 
does it? I'm confused. It seemed to me that you just said that it did.

Is <div class="issue"> or <span class="price"> really hard to use? It 
seems to me that people have no problem using it in practice. Certainly 
relative to the number of people using class attributes and the number of 
people using namespace prefixes, I see far less confusion from people 
using class attributes, yet you were pushing namespace prefixes as a 
solution that did address your use case.

I'm trying to address your use case here, it would be helpful if you 
didn't just dismiss my attempts at doing so.


In an earlier e-mail when we were discussing other mechanisms to address 
your use case, I wrote the following. You never replied, dismissing my 
attempts at attempting to address your use case. If you are going to claim 
that I'm dismissing your feedback, the _least_ you could do is respond to 
my questions about said feedback.

Can you answer the following?:

> > > > [ analysis showing why I concluded that not having a namespace 
> > > > prefix mechanism is better than having one, even if it means that
> > > > we our extension mechanism can't use tag names ]
> > >
> > > I would be a fool to say that indirection syntaxes don't have 
> > > problems. The only thing that would be a bigger mistake would be to 
> > > not build in a mechanism for distributed extensibility.
> >
> > Why would it be a bigger mistake? As far as I can tell, from the 
> > analysis above, it would be at most an equally big mistake, and likely 
> > a lesser mistake.
> 
> What is clear that you have decided this.  And base this decision on a 
> number of anecdotes that you regularly pull out.

Ok, but you apparently have concluded the opposite, so what do you base 
your decision on? How is my analysis flawed?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 00:08:28 UTC