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

Sam Ruby wrote:
> [...]
> While not explicitly mentioned, I will make the assumption that future 
> releases of IE will continue to support tagUrn.

tagUrn needs to be considered alongside scopeName and 
document.namespaces, since they are the other DOM parts of IE's 
pseudo-namespace implementation.

(I've updated http://philip.html5.org/misc/xmlns-dom.html to include 
scopeName now.)

I can see four reasonable possibilities:

  * IE continues to support tagUrn, scopeName and document.namespaces, 
while all other browsers continue not to.

  * IE removes support for tagUrn, scopeName and document.namespaces

  * All other browsers add support for tagUrn, scopeName and 
document.namespaces

  * We try to forget all about this, and satisfy any relevant use cases 
using syntax that doesn't require all this complexity and reverse 
engineering and compatibility-risking changes of behaviour.

The first option is bad for interoperability, because people will write 
valid HTML5 code using the features and it will break in other browsers.

The second option will cause content like in 
http://google.com/codesearch?q=document%5C.namespaces to break in IE 
(particularly the scripts that use document.namespaces to trigger VML).

The third option will cause content like in 
http://google.com/codesearch?q=document%5C.namespaces to break in other 
browsers (particularly the scripts that test document.namespaces to 
switch to IE-specific code paths).

-- 
Philip Taylor
pjt47@cam.ac.uk

Received on Saturday, 3 October 2009 13:49:39 UTC