Re: XML namespaces on the Web

On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:31:55 -0600, Shelley Powers wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Julian Reschke:
>> Julian Reschke wrote:
>>> Lachlan Hunt wrote:

>> Clarifying: I disagree with "...we can all agree on ... they have a need to
>> implement non-draconian...".

> Forgive my denseness here, but can someone point out the message 
> in this thread that is directly relevant to a possible change
> in the HTML5 specification?
> 
> Anne mentioned something about being tasked at TPAC for providing a
> solution for making namespaces "usable on the web". That seems to
> exceed this group's charter a bit. Especially when we get into
> discussions about XML5.

We discuss whether to change text/HTML or not w.r.t. to namespaces. I 
think  Anne's idea with XML5 was: Let namespaces happen in XML. Not in 
text/HTML. Thus his message relates to HTML5 in the sense that if we 
follow his proposal then we will /not/ need to add namespaces to 
text/HTML. I assume that many vendors think that it is easier to add 
recovery to XML than to add namespaces to text/HTML. 

Anne proposes making XML more attractive for authors and vendors by 
adding 
recovery as a solution to the "distributed extensibility on the Web" 
problem.  The question then is: Would this make Microsoft support XML 
in Internet Explorer? And what about the XML folks? It sounded to me as 
if many of them could accept such a recovery spec, as long as the 
result of the recovery is clearly labeled as "not XML". It is unclear 
to me why you and Julian disagree with that approach.

Maciej, OTOH, in his "XML and HTML differences" reply in this 
thread[1], talked about  making text/HTML more attractive, by making it 
more like XML. I believe that with Maciej's approach, then text/HTML 
(with namespaces support) could become the recovery format for XML. 
Opera - and only Opera - already offers users a button to reparse 
malformed XHTML as text/HTML. I don't know if your or Julian finds 
Opera's behaviour acceptable, though ...

The important question is what the effect of XML5 would be on HTML5: In 
theory HTML5 would become more of transitional format if user agents 
would support XML5. But the other possible effect of delegating 
namespaces to XML is that text/HTML is left in the same dark as it was 
left in when W3 shifted its focus to XML and XHTML.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Nov/0414
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 2009 16:27:44 UTC