Re: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal (Was: ISSUE-41: Decentralized extensibility)

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
> >
> > ... Because those pages will continue to work as 
> > application/xhtml+xml, there's no need to migrate them over to 
> > text/html. On the other hand, not supporting the full range of XML 
> > syntax makes the text/html syntax simpler. Here we have an opportunity 
> > to avoid taking on some of the worst baggage of XML (Draconian error 
> > handling and namespace declarations). ...
> 
> You may call it "some of the worst baggage", I would call "some of the 
> biggest advantages".
> 
> (Just trying to make sure that it's understood that there is no WG 
> consensus about the benefits or problems of these)

It is certainly the case that not everybody agrees that namespaces and 
fail-on-error are bad features.

However, the assumptions that namespace prefixes are bad and that handling 
errors in a fatal manner is bad are both assumptions that we have taken as 
fundamental in the HTML5 work since 2003, based on careful studies of 
those issues at the time. Only a radical shift in the way the Web works in 
the intervening five years would affect this conclusion. There's no point 
reopening that decision without evidence of such a radical shift.

If evidence to turn these assumptions around were indeed to come up, then 
this would have a massive effect on the HTML5 spec, and would probably put 
us back at least 6 months so that we could reengineer the spec to be 
designed with the new principles in mind.

In cases where there is no consensus, we need to pick a choice and go 
with it, or else we risk wasting years of time just going backwards and 
forwards on the issue, second guessing ourselves. Sometimes one agrees 
with the choice, and sometimes one doesn't, e.g. as I don't in the issue 
of including XML-like syntactic placebos in text/html. That's just the way 
the chips fall.

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

Received on Tuesday, 29 July 2008 10:18:56 UTC