Re: Placing elements in the HTML namespace

On Jan 15, 2009, at 7:40 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> On Jan 15, 2009, at 7:34 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>>>
>>> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>>> Though for CSS purposes all three treat HTML as being in the  
>>>> (X)HTML namespace last time I checked.
>>>
>>> Right.  Gecko has a concept of "html element" that is distinct  
>>> from the namespace, and this is used to force such elements to  
>>> match CSS selectors in the XHTML namespace.
>>>
>>> However, there are two differences between XHTML and HTML in Gecko  
>>> last I checked (in 2005, but I don't think we've changed these):
>>>
>>> 1)  frames/iframes.  For XHTML we use the id attribute value as the
>>>   window name, for HTML we use the name attribute value.  Should  
>>> this
>>>   be based on the document type instead?  Or something else?
>>> 2)  Serializing XML -- for XHTML we set shorthand attrs to be
>>>   |foo="foo"| while for HTML we set them to just be |foo|.
>>>   This only affects people calling the XML serializer on a DOM  
>>> coming
>>>   from text/html, but that sounds like something HTML5 wants to
>>>   support.
>> In WebKit we implement all HTML/XHTML differences based on whether  
>> the containing document is an HTML or XML document. The element  
>> objects themselves are indistinguishable.
>
> Wouldn't that mean that they change name when moved between  
> documents? From 'div' to 'DIV'?

Yes, Node.nodeName and Element.tagName would change from lowercase to  
uppercase if the same element is moved from an XML document to an HTML  
document. Node.localName would remain consistently lowercase.

This is implemented by keeping the names of HTML elements (created for  
instance by the HTML parser or by HTMLDocument.createElement) in  
lowercase internally, and converting to uppercase on request when the  
element is currently owned by an HTML document.

Note also that according to the spec the DOM elements cannot ever move  
between documents, but browsers (including WebKit-based ones) do  
widely allow this.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Friday, 16 January 2009 03:54:15 UTC