Re: ISSUE-41/ACTION-97 decentralized-extensibility

2009/10/1 Laurens Holst <laurens.nospam@grauw.nl>:
> or part of their data wasn’t visible and it turned out one of the fields in
> their database contained an & without being followed by a space.

Whereas in XML that would result in *all* their data not being visible
. . . but that's a side point.  The HTML syntax has serious
deficiencies, but in practice it's not particularly hard to use,
mostly.

> So you’re saying people need to read specs to be able to use XML?

No, I'm just pointing out that HTML as-is is easy to use at a basic
level.  This should be clear by just looking at the source code of
most manually-written web pages -- obviously whoever wrote it didn't
have any idea what they were doing, but it still largely works.  :)

> Are we still talking about namespaces? Because I do not see how this is
> related. I know the usual HTML propaganda.

I was explaining why it's bad to add new features that are hard to
figure out.  I'm not the one arguing that namespaces are complicated
-- I don't feel I have enough evidence to personally reach a
conclusion on that either way.  Notice that I only responded to the
parts of your post that argued a) HTML is complicated for authors, and
b) objections to additional complexity are ungrounded or hypocritical.
 The word "namespace" occurs nowhere in my post.

> It is not okay, however I find it kind of hypocritical that the HTML5 people
> keep stumbling over the alleged XML namespaces ‘complexity’, and they
> themselves have created (or well, documented) one of the most horrendous
> monsters in existence, complexity-wise.

s/created (or, well, documented)/documented/

Nobody in the HTML Working Group or WHATWG likes the complexity of
HTML.  Existing unremovable complexity doesn't make the addition of
new complexity more justifiable.

Received on Thursday, 1 October 2009 16:32:34 UTC