Re: SVG and MathML in text/html

Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> FUD. XHTML and RSS are extremely bad examples,
> 
> They are the most common XML vocabularies exposed to the masses of authors.
> 
>> because they suffer from clients that do not use XML parsers.
> 
> Why is that?

For XHTML: because of IE. For RSS: I really don't want to dig into that 
history.

>> Atom, for instance, works much better.
> 
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/atom-xhtml/

It does work better.

Yes, there may be clients that are broken. Don't use them, or file bug 
reports.

For instance, after lots of complaints over on the Atom mailing list 
about Google Reader, I spent a few minutes writing a bug report, and 
guess what -- the problem has been fixed.

>>> 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.
> 
> Putting all the element names from the Web platform languages (XHTML, 
> SVG, MathML) into a single space of XML element names without any URI 
> binding mechanism. That is, if HTML defined "table", it is taken and 
> MathML should define "mtable".

Doesn't scale. How do you add a new vocabulary? Don't say you don't need 
to in the future.

>>>> 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?
> 
> Yes, when the plausible alternative is not having to do that.

Well, short names require a central registry. Doesn't scale as well as 
URIs. See the related microformats discussions.

>  ...

BR, Julian

Received on Monday, 10 March 2008 21:07:14 UTC