Re: XMLNS in Inkscape and other editors

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 20, 2009, at 7:21 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:05:11 +0100, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>>
>>> Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Shelley took up the problem that SVG editors are known to place
>>>> namespaces in their code, thus automatically being invalid - bug
>>>> 7510 [1].
>>>>
>>>> However, online services such as Gooogle Sites [2] (formerly known
>>>> as Jotspot [3]) do the same, directly in the HTML (XHTML served as
>>>> text/HTML). E.g. from the Chromium homepage[4]:
>>>>
>>>> <body xmlns="http://www.google.com/ns/jotspot" id="body" class=" en">
>>>> ...
>>>
>>> Good catch.
>>>
>>> But isn't this simply a case of a bad xmlns attribute value (a proper
>>> bug), instead of a try to use namespaces for embedding additional
>>> data?
>>
>> That body element holds several elements carefully linked to the XHTML
>> namespace. For example:
>>
>> <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" id="COMP_14720868319272995"
>> class="sites-embed">
>
> Do you think it was intentional to make the body not be an HTML body?
> Doesn't seem likely to me.

I agree, it's totally unlikely that anyone meant for the body tag not
to be in the XHTML namespace. I think it's equally unlikely that
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Book.aspx?ID=13697&locale=en-us
is meant to be served with no content-type resulting in well...
disaster. The goal of not breaking the web can't only be met by
browsers. Servers and authors do have some responsibility. I'm not
sure it's any more onerous to demand that HTML tags be in the correct
namespace then to demand that HTML be served as text/html. Clearly two
of the largest software companies can't always do either, but that
doesn't mean we shouldn't expect them to.

--Gavin Carothers

Received on Saturday, 21 November 2009 13:41:26 UTC