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

Ian Hickson wrote on 07/29/2008 06:18:19 AM:
>
> 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.

Not too long ago, the presumption was that trailing soliduses in tags must
always be treated as an error, lest the web would break.  This was replaced
by the assumption that trailing soliduses in all but a few, well defined
places would be treated as an error.

Yes, some people here have the assumption that namespace prefixes must
always be treated as an error, lest the web would break.

> 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.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>