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

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On Oct 2, 2009, at 5:33 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
>>> 3) A spec based on Microsoft's proposal could state changes to the 
>>> parsing algorithm, or just define a complete modified copy of the 
>>> parsing algorithm. After all, Namespaces in XML modifies XML parsing 
>>> by modifying the grammar of XML, even though that was never an 
>>> official extension point. I think changes to the HTML5 parsing 
>>> algorithm are necessary in some form to fully define Microsoft's 
>>> proposal.
>>
>> I would not be in favor of this, but am wondering if there are small 
>> changes to the HTML5 spec that might enable #2 to be pursued?  I won't 
>> speculate on what those changes might be.
> 
> #2 can be pursued with no changes to the HTML5 spec.

I guess I was unclear.  If #2 is not viable given the current HTML5, the 
question I was attempting to pose is: what changes would be required to 
HTML5 in order to enable #2 to be viable for the remainder?

I'm simply motivated to look for ways of decoupling these... both to 
allow HTML5 to proceed unfettered, and to allow the proposal to proceed. 
  As an analogy, if there was an insistence that RDFa be defined in 
HTML5 *before* RDFa in HTML was fully defined (and to date, it clearly 
still has a way to go), I don't think we could have made the progress to 
date that we have done.

>> It is also possible (though I will grant, unlikely) that the current 
>> state is broken, and that given MS's input the browsers vendors will, 
>> collectively, want to converge onto a different point than the group 
>> which did not include MS did.
> 
> That is possible, but not responsive to my point. A proposal to 
> implement exactly IE's namespaces-in-HTML support would have 
> considerably less compatibility risk and might lead to the kind of 
> fruitful discussion you propose. But Microsoft's proposal has many 
> details where it differs from *both* IE *and* other browsers in the same 
> way.

I was clearly making a different point.  But instead of continuing to 
speculate in the absence of a more detailed proposal, I'll withdraw this 
point for the moment.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Saturday, 3 October 2009 01:35:57 UTC