What's the problem? "Reuse of 1998 XHTML namespace is potentially misleading/wrong"

I accepted ACTION-79 on ISSUE 60, "Reuse of 1998 XHTML namespace is potentially misleading/wrong", which was to send an email sparking a discussion of this issue.

I'm searching around for some email or writeup which would explain why this was raised as an issue, but I haven't really found any with a justification for why something that is "potentially" a problem might actually *be* a problem, and raised as an issue without further substantiation.

Generally namespaces name vocabularies and not languages that use those vocabularies; generally, versioning of languages is handled independently through some other mechanism (e.g., DOCTYPE as per ISSUE-4, which we will discuss soon although I've put it off), and generally, reuse of a namespace in a new version of a language is perfectly appropriate.

If the issue is that the XML language described in the HTML5 document does not, in fact, share vocabularies with 1998 XHTML and isn't in fact a new version of 1998 XHTML language, that would point to problems with the HTML5 document not being in line with the charter, which is explicit about producing "incremental revisions". If there are any such problems, those should be raised as issues, not changing the namespace.

Can anyone explain why this issue should remain open in its current form?

Otherwise, I will propose closing the issue.

Larry
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http://larry.masinter.net