Re: SVG and MathML in text/html

On Mar 11, 2008, at 17:09, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>> It does work better.
>>>
>>> Yes, there may be clients that are broken.
>> And why might that be? Perhaps XML is tough.
>
> Yes, for people that do not use XML parsers, or do not understand  
> their APIs.

I've had to explain how Namespaces in XML works in *W3C* meetings (f2f  
and telecon). Perhaps the failure to understand XML APIs that reflect  
Namespaces in XML isn't the fault of the application developers who  
use the APIs.

>> In the past decade, the vocabulary of the Web platform has been  
>> extended by a whopping two additional element sets: SVG and MathML.  
>> Next XBL2 may join the platform.
>
> Cause or effect?

Namespaces in XML cannot be the effect of the level of growth since  
Namespaces in XML came first. I wouldn't dare to claim that the  
existence of Namespaces in XML *caused* the Web platform to grow by  
only two element sets in a decade since HTML 4. :-)

>> A central registry is a good thing in order to avoid a Babel of  
>> languages with no coherent common feature set for authors to rely on.
>
> And then the registry becomes the bottleneck, and people start using  
> names without registering them. We've been there before, haven't we?

It doesn't follow that a central registry is a bad idea. It may just  
be that the procedure doesn't suit the would-be participants.

Consider the IANA MIME type registry and the old Apple file type  
registry. People have felt the need to route around the former but  
generally not the latter (in its heyday). Both are examples of central  
registries. The difference is in how they work(ed).

>>> Doesn't scale as well as URIs. See the related microformats  
>>> discussions.
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/ seems to scale well enough to cover HTML, SVG  
>> and MathML.
>
> Not sure what you're trying to say here.

http://www.w3.org/TR/ is, in fact, a central place for announcing Web  
vocabularies, so within this central place Namespaces in XML is an  
overkill.

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

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 16:18:57 UTC