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

> Specifically I want to know whether or not the group feels providing
> some sort of a solution for decentralized extensibility, in particular
> decentralized extensibility of markup, is important.

I'm not sure what the difference between "decentralized extensibility"
and "decentralized extensibility of markup" might be, or for that matter
what distinguishes "decentralized extensibility" from the extensibility
features already present in HTML. (What's not distributed about
disparate authors infusing markup with novel semantics via the class=""
attribute or the microdata attributes? Disambiguation is much less of a
problem than people seem to believe.)

> In short, should HTML 5 provide an explicit means for others to define
> custom elements and attributes within HTML markup?

As far as I can tell, we already have decentralized extensibility in
HTML At least, we already have a variety of decentralized extensibility
worth wanting. I don't think Sufficiently More Complicated forms of DE
are woth the costs.

The WHATWG's FAQ has a question about this:

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#HTML5_should_support_a_way_for_anyone_to_invent_new_elements.21

That answer aligns with my view of the matter pretty well. (And, though
I speak only for myself, that answer has been in the WHATWG FAQ for a
long time, so I bet there are lots of others who concur.)

> Note that supporting decentralized markup extensibility does not
> necessarily mean you feel XML Namespaces are the appropriate solution.

Indeed.


-- 
Edward O'Connor

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 21:48:06 UTC