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

On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
> My deepest sympathy for your hands.

Thanks. :-)


> To the best of my knowledge, we have never met.  I also don't believe 
> that meeting in persion is a prerequisite for participation in this 
> working group.

Sure. It was just an offer.


> No matter however carefully you may have considered something, the 
> possibility always exists that somebody may spot something that you 
> initially missed.  Given that you have always envisioned a 19 or so year 
> process for HTML5, I only ask that all decisions be treated as 
> provisional until documented.

All decisions are treated as provisional full stop; even issues that have 
received large amounts of documentation (e.g. the global href issue, which 
even made it into the WHATWG's FAQ) can be revisited (e.g. the global href 
issue, which resulted in a change to the <a> element's content model 
today). What it takes is new information. I understand that it's hard to 
know what information is new when I don't document everything I have 
considered, but I don't know of any way to solve that.


> The proposal I was interested in understanding the disposition of was 
> Microsoft's.  I have no doubt that early betas of IE differ from the 
> proposal, and that what ultimately will be included in the release will 
> factor in feedback and user experience.

Philip just sent a pretty concise summary:

   http://www.w3.org/mid/4890704F.7040501@cam.ac.uk

As he says, what HTML5 has today (for MathML, and commented out for SVG) 
is much the same, except that we don't do prefixes, since we've 
established that they are bad for authors, and we have a short list of 
well-defined entry points into the parsing model (just <math> in the 
current spec, <svg> in the commented out spec, but new elements could be 
added to this list as new vocabularies come up and are considered 
important enough to be added to the core Web platform). Not doing prefixes 
simplifies the model quite a bit (no need for the declaration incantations 
that IE uses).

Is this enough information? I'm not really sure what else to tell you.

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

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2008 22:42:23 UTC