Re: XML namespaces on the Web

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:31:23AM -0600, Shelley Powers wrote:
> Perhaps rather than redefine XML, make it looser, we need to educate
> browser developers about being aware of the user environment in which
> they operate, and respond to errors accordingly.

+1

The biggest cutural difference I see, I think, is that for HTML,
the Web browser is "do your best to display whatever was made"
whereas for XML, it needs to be, "help the author to make a
syntatically correct document".

I think I'd agree with those who say RSS isn't really a very
typical XML format -- errors are so common that in a way it's
closer to HTML.

Right now, apart from XHTML served as text/html, and RSS, most
XML in the world is at least well-formed, because it needs to be,
in order to work at all.  Overall, I think people in the XML community
really want to keep it that way, too, and the "errors are fatal"
policy is how that's accomplished.

The change to XML I've suggested for unobtrusive namespaces is not
related to error handling.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 2009 19:23:28 UTC