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

Ian Hickson wrote:
> ...
>>> Could you actually give an example where this could happen? I haven't 
>>> been able to find a case where an actual clash could happen, even with 
>>> a totally open TLD space.
>> As the TLD space isn't open *yet*, it's hard to provide that example.
> 
> Pretend that the TLD space was completely open, so that you could invent 
> any random TLD you wanted.
> 
> Could you actually give an example where people using different 
> disambiguation schemes would somehow come up with clashing names? It seems 
> like it is quite possible to design disambiguation schemes that can't be 
> confused with other disambiguation schemes and therefore can't have 
> clashes.

If Alice's disambiguation scheme is tld.sld-identifier, and Bob's is 
sld.tld-identifier, and Alice's domain name is "ab.cd", and Bob's domain 
is "cd.ab", and they both want to define "title", both will end up with

   "ab.cd-title"

This can be avoided by mandating exactly one scheme. A URI-based scheme 
would be a candidate, and have the advantage that those are well 
understood and are used almost everywhere else (which makes 
roundtripping easy).

>>>> That being said, clashes have occurred (what does the "title" class 
>>>> name stand for?), and it's also a known problem that you get in 
>>>> trouble once you want to nest information.
>>> These problems are fixable without complicated disambiguation schemes.
>> How?
> 
> Using different classes, defining precise behaviour, etc.

That requires central coordination.

As far as I can tell, the problems with microformats are well understood 
by now (nesting, abuse of title attribute, process only works for a few 
common formats), but it seems you prefer to ignore them.

>>> I mean that instead of sticking your extension here:
>>>
>>>    <xxxx>
>>>
>>> ...you stick it here:
>>>
>>>    <div class="xxxx">
>>>
>>> It's a different syntactic space than the language's main vocabulary. 
>>> Is that an acceptable price?
>> If it would work *reliably*, yes. I don't see how it could, as class 
>> already has different semantics.
> 
> It has the exact semantics you want -- author-defined extension point.
> 
> Why would it not work reliably? Could you provide an example of something 
> that would be unreliable?

It would work only reliably if a naming scheme is chosen that makes it 
impossible that different authors accidentally choose the same name for 
different purposes. To avoid that, a concrete syntax needs to be defined.

BR, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 06:36:55 UTC