Re: Placing elements in the HTML namespace

Sam Ruby wrote:
> HTML5 parsing is defined in terms of the DOM produced.
> 
> If you take a simple HTML page (without xmlns marker attributes), and 
> parse it by the Gecko, Presto, or WebKit layout engines's parsers, what 
> namespace are the DOM elements produced in?

null, null, http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml, respectively.

> To me, DOM consistency would argue that html5lib should do likewise.

IIRC the spec follows webkit here because it make the XHTML and HTML 
cases more similar ("DOM Consistency"). I guess this will case some 
breakage e.g. in js libraries that use XPath to select elements. So it 
is possible that "Don't Break The Web" also comes into this, but I have 
no idea how significant it is.

> Providing an option to turn this behavior off (with the option 
> defaulting to false) is not something I would see as a problem.

That would be a "don't comply with the spec" option. Which I will 
include if the spec doesn't change. But if people are choosing to ignore 
MUST level requirements in the spec for the benefit of their users (even 
as an option) it suggests a bug in the spec.

Received on Thursday, 15 January 2009 13:30:11 UTC