Re: SVG and MathML in text/html

On Mar 11, 2008, at 17:14, Jeff Schiller wrote:

> But what about outside the "open web" platform?  Can we safely say
> that we don't care about name-collisions?

Personally, I think that it is OK if people come up with secondary  
uses for Web languages outside the Web but that Web language specs  
shouldn't address the perceived or actual non-Web uses at the expense  
of the Web (either by complicating the Web platform or by incurring  
the opportunity cost of the WG working on non-Web stuff).

> See the XAML <Path/> element:
> http://www.longhorncorner.com/UploadFile/mahesh/XamlPath06102005084852AM/XamlPath.aspx
>
> Case insensitivity would be a problem because of that.  Microsoft
> would have had to rename their element to something else because SVG
> got their first?

Even now that the XML namespacing mechanism is in place, are SVG and  
XAML mixed in the same client DOM in practice?

> Not that you'd necessarily be inter-mixing these,

Without intermixing, what's the problem?

> and maybe I'm
> "cheating" by using standards that aren't considered part of the "open
> web" strata - but namespaces do provide a way to specify in a
> non-ambiguous way which vocabulary you're using.


There are plenty of custom XML vocabularies where the format is known  
from usage context anyway. For example, there's no need for Flickr API  
responses to assert being Flickr API responses. Also, the namespace on  
the Validator.nu XML output format is useless in practice. There's a  
namespace only because it is the XML convention these days. Specifying  
the vocabulary unambiguously doesn't help if XML document gets sent to  
a client that doesn't know about the vocabulary.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 15:57:25 UTC