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

On Friday, October 23, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Tony Ross <tross@microsoft.com> wrote:
> > On Friday, October 23, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> >> Hi Tony,
> >>
> >> You're actually asking two somewhat different questions:
> >>
> >> 1. Should HTML5 have decentralized extensibility.
> >> 2. Should HTML5 provide an explicit means for others to define custom
> >> elements/attributes within HTML markup.
> >
> > Mostly I was trying to clarify that I feel the real focus is #2.
> >
> >> As for 2, I don't really feel strongly. As a browser developer I like
> >> the idea of every now and then being able to do experimental
> >> extensions in the form of elements, the same way that we do for CSS.
> >> It allows us to test features without cluttering up the namespace of
> >> standardized element names. And since I'd like to see this on occasion
> >> for browsers, I'd imagine that others would want to do it for other
> >> things.
> >
> > I feel those who would benefit most are the non-browser developers,
> > such as script library authors.
> 
> But script library authors have showed fairly well that they can live
> in the same namespace without causing collisions. These libraries tend
> to add functions both to the global object, and on various DOM objects
> such as Nodes and XMLHttpRequest. So far I have not heard that
> collisions have been a big problem.

The nature of script and these libraries provides consumers with an adequate means of resolving object name conflicts should they arise. The global variable for these libraries can typically be reassigned to another variable without impacting the behavior of the library itself. Thus should two names ever conflict, a page author can just rename the first before the second library loads.

-Tony

Received on Wednesday, 28 October 2009 01:08:09 UTC