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

Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com> wrote:
> Some relevant reading (although rather brief at the moment):
> 
> http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/WhyNoNameSpaces
> 
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>> I much rather like the mechanism that CSS is using. Non-standard token
>> names are prepended by "-name-" in order to avoid collisions. Could we
>> do something similar by using "name_" at the beginning of
>> non-standardized names. We could even let people use element/attribute
>> names like "www_myorg_org_myelement".
> 
> This sounds a lot like section 3 of the proposal.  If a proposal like
> this were adopted, couldn't we allow namespaces, but say that they're
> just a prefix like "foo:", and drop the association with URLs?
> Hypothetically, you could have a problem if there were conflicts, but
> in practice this doesn't arise very often (e.g., in CSS, as you note).
>  The risk of that could be mitigated by having a central registry
> that's, for instance, a wiki page.  The spec could require that all
> namespace prefixes be registered there, and validators could check for
> it.

Then you've lost the distributed part of the extensibility, and also 
added confusion for people who are familiar with real namespaces.

> I seem to recall that there have been objections to any form of
> distributed extensibility, though.  UAs are supposed to get new
> features specced, not make up their own syntax.  That's why data-*
> must be ignored by user agents, for instance: "User agents must not
> derive any implementation behavior from these attributes or values.
> Specifications intended for user agents must not define these
> attributes to have any meaningful values."
> <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/elements.html#embedding-custom-non-visible-data>.
>  But I'll leave it for more qualified people to elaborate on that.

There are no such restrictions on microdata and RDFa as far as I know. 
What does namespaces provide that these do not already allow?

-- 
Magnus Kristiansen
"Don't worry; the Universe IS out to get you."

Received on Thursday, 1 October 2009 23:39:14 UTC