RE: ISSUE-4: Versioning, namespace URIs and MIME types

On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
> Implementations that support more than one language or incompatible 
> version need to, along with the code that can generate or access a DOM, 
> remember the language or version associated with the code.

That would violate the spirit of our DOM Consistency design principle.

It would prevent reuse of scripts across multiple document types. For 
example, it would mean there would have to be a multiple versions of the 
dojo libraries, or the dojo library would have to detect which "mode" it 
was in and then use the right code paths. Experience just with the "quirks 
mode" DOM API differences and the few differences that specs required 
between HTML and XML modes has shown overwhelmingly that such differences 
have a huge cost associated with them. This is how we ended up with the 
DOM Consistency design principle for XML vs HTML; I would posit that the 
same reasoning would apply to different XHTML versions.


> I'm not sure there's a use case for a script embedded in one language or 
> version to generate a document in another language or incompatible 
> version.  Is there?

Assuming we're still talking about XHTML1 and XHTML2 being implemented in 
the same browser (are we? It's unclear to me exactly what the point of 
this thread is at this point), then one use case might be an XHTML2 
document embedding a gadget or advertising unit written for XHTML1.

Note that having XHTML2 and XHTML1 share a namespace would also mean that 
there was no way even without scripting to embed content written for 
XHTML1 and content written for XHTML2 into the same SVG document.

Anyway, XHTML2 vs XHTML1 seems out of scope for this mailing list, so it 
seems we should discuss this elsewhere, if at all. If this is of relevance 
for one of this working group's deliverables, it would be helpful if more 
concrete suggestions were discussed. I'm not sure we can make much 
progress with hypothetical discussion.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 00:09:22 UTC