Re: ISSUE-41 (Dave Orchard): Decentralized extensibility

On May 12, 2008, at 10:12 , Henri Sivonen wrote:

> On May 12, 2008, at 05:06 , Sam Ruby wrote:
>
>> > Conclusion:
>> >
>> > It seems to me that mixing XHTML5 with product-specific elements  
>> and
>> > attributes in XML is a good fit for this extension case. No new
>> > extension mechanism is needed, since Namespaces in XML are  
>> available.
>> >
>> > Objection: XML is too hard because it's Draconian.
>> > Answer: Then we need non-Draconian XML5.
>> > Follow-up objection: Want one syntax instead of two (HTML5 and  
>> XML5).
>>
>> Actually, I believe that the answer above is arguing for THREE  
>> syntaxes.  XHTML5 is not going away.  Nor is it going to usurp the  
>> web.  So we either need Case #3 addressed by text/html, OR by a new  
>> syntax that has most of the charateristics of HTML5.  Note: I am  
>> *not* arguing for three syntaxes, I am stating that EITHER this  
>> needs to be addressed by text/html OR we need three syntaxes.
>>
> Fair enough.
>
> I will then argue that we shouldn't let case #3 inconvenience  
> authoring for browsers, so if we end up with a two-way choice of  
> adding a third syntax or making the browser-targeted syntax crufty,  
> I think we should add a third syntax instead of making targeting the  
> multi-vendor Web platform crufty in order to enable the same syntax  
> target specific non-browser products.

One more thing: "XML5" means a parser spec that could replace XML 1.0  
parsing thereby not increasing the number of parsers a product needs  
to have if the product is to consume both XML5 and XML 1.0 content.

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

Received on Monday, 12 May 2008 07:39:47 UTC