Re: XML namespaces on the Web - proposal restated

You wrote to Liam Quin:
> Do I understand correctly that you're proposing a purely editorial change  
> to HTML5?
I think it's too early to be sure if this would be sufficient, but possibly the Unobtrusive Namespaces spec (or something on a higher level - see [1] and what it might evolve into) could define a form of minimal conformance which with which UAs not implementing it fully could claim conformance satisfying just the requirements of HTML5 (plus probably doing something non-fatal but determinable on encountering an unsupported overriding declaration).

> Wouldn't "namespace mashups" and user-defined namespaces require writing a  
> namespace definition file, which seems like at least as much overhead as  
> using namespace syntax?
Much less. You write it once, it's very small (usually) and applied not only to a single arbitrarily large document, but any set thereof you may create. For virtually all use cases you'll be able to readily find one suitable for your needs on the Internet (I'd be willing to put up a service for finding or generating them based on requirements stated by the user). A typical author wouldn't ever write one.
I believe even that Liam went too far in his simplification. Unobtrusive Namespaces markup language is an XML dialect and it merits its own namespace. Otherwise it will stand out as a special case, have impaired interoperability with other vocabularies and technologies, potentially add complexity to toolchains which would otherwise round-trip it as any content in an unrecognised namespace. For bootstrapping, this would indeed require explicit namespace syntax in these documents. Also a question to Liam: would dropping the desire not to have explicit namespace syntax in definition documents corroborate the alternative idea of using DSRL or a simplified profile of it (TBD in such case)?

Best regards,

Krzysztof Maczyński

[1] http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/docs/defproc

Received on Friday, 20 November 2009 12:00:17 UTC