Re: SVG and MathML in text/html

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> ...
>> I don’t think this is a good idea.  If you allow <CIRCLE CX=40> to be 
>> the same thing as <circle cx=”40″/> eventually we’ll start to see 
>> people producing non-compliant SVG in the wild.
> 
> We can define it as compliant SVG in text/html.

I think that's exactly what Jeff doesn't want to happen.

>> just like the mess we have now with browsers trying to understand as 
>> much content as they can in order to compete.
> 
> It's not a mess where there's a detailed parser spec.

Disagreed: it's still a big mess, just one with a detailed description.

> And, yet, XML is consistently failing on the Web. XML is succeeding in 
> enterprise system integration. But the moment people try to produce 
> XHTML or RSS, it is revealed that XML is too hard for the kind of mass 
> authoring that text/html works for.

FUD. XHTML and RSS are extremely bad examples, because they suffer from 
clients that do not use XML parsers.

Atom, for instance, works much better.

> That would lose the non-Draconianness property of text/html. Draconian 
> error handling, namespaces and DTDs are the three major failings of XML.

Two of them are the reasons why it *does* work so well.

> I recommend anyone who still thinks xmlns is a good idea to look at the 
> 10th anniversary threads on xml-dev.
> Even well-knows XML people say that namespaces are
>  * "controversial" 
> http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200802/msg00146.html
>  * "done badly" http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200802/msg00149.html
>  * presumably needing "fixing" 
> http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200802/msg00221.html
> 
> Also check out the comment from David Megginson over at Tim Bray's blog:
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/14/Lousy-Aggregators
> 
> Considering that even XML folks admit Namespaces in XML is bad, it would 
> be silly for us not to try to shield hapless HTML authors from the 
> badness to the extent possible.

It would be interesting to see what a better solution would have been. I 
think the problems with namespaces are well understood, but that doesn't 
mean it is simple to do things better.

>> Maybe it’s because I’m used to writing SVG, but I really don’t have a 
>> problem with the concept of mixed namespace content.
> 
> I have a problem with namespace URIs every single time I need to deal 
> with XHTML, SVG, etc. I always have to waste time looking up and URI to 
> copy and paste because trying to go by memory and getting it wrong 
> (which year? trailing slash?) would waste even more time.

I fail to see how this is a problem. Is copy & paste too hard?

>> In fact, all browsers except for IE can handle application/xhtml+xml 
>> MIME type these days, so it really seems to me that the verdict’s 
>> still out on whether XHTML is a good technology or not.
> 
> Even if XHTML is good technology as far as pure technology value goes 
> with network effect considerations, XHTML flunks Technology Strategy 101 
> by failing to plug into the existing the network of the text/html 
> installed base.

Not sure what this means.

 > ...

BR, Julian

Received on Monday, 10 March 2008 20:16:23 UTC