[ISSUE-41] Namespaces in HTML

I've been following the discussion about HTML Reunification in Sam
Ruby's blog for a while and I developed the idea that extensions
elements / attributes should never conflict with existing HTML
attributes.
We have a method in XML to allow this, it is called Namespaces and
allow to extend any language by simply adding a new namespace URI, so
that elements in the previous namespace, mantained by a different
organization, never conflict.
So why don't we introduce the same method in HTML, like IE's Improved
Namespace Support?

I'm not asking to introduce all prefixing syntaxes, that are known to
create a lot of problems. Just say that
elements with a xmlns attribute whose value is not one of the
HTML/SVG/MathML namespaces are foreign content and are treated like
<svg> / <mathml> start tag for parsing
those elements, and all child elements without an xmlns attribute, are
in the indicated namespace
For compatibility, <html>,<svg>,<mathml> always imply the appropriate
xmlns attribute, that cannot be changed

I hope that you'll like this idea, that could solve a lot of
extensibility problems, while keeping consistency of DOM and
compatibility with XML. It is also backward compatible, as long as
nobody included xmlns with unknown namespaces.

Giovanni

PS: please leave my address in the Cc to avoid fragmentation

Received on Saturday, 2 May 2009 10:17:30 UTC