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

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Adrian Bateman <adrianba@microsoft.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, August 20, 2009 8:34 AM, I wrote:
>> On Thursday, August 20, 2009 7:44 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:
>> > Adrian Bateman wrote:
>> > > Tony Ross has picked up this action. It's closely related to planning
>> > > work he has already started. We intend to send a proposal to the
>> > > working group before the end of September. I believe a status of OPEN
>> > > is appropriate given that we are actively working on this issue. If
>> > > the group prefers to close the action and set the status of the issue
>> > > to raised until we submit that feedback we wouldn't object to that
>> > either.
>> >
>> > The action can be OPEN and the issue status can be RAISED.  I believe
>> > that that would effectively represent the current status, per the
>> > definition of RAISED:
>> >
>> > http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/#head-
>> > 47c0b55d661dcf93f76d586ddbe292c9abc597e4
>> >
>> > Not being familiar with Tony Ross, if you are OK with it, I would
>> > prefer to keep the action assigned to you (Adrian).
>>
>> I'm okay with both of those.
>
> Tony has written up our thoughts on Distributed (or Decentralized) Extensibility in the attached HTML document. Tony is on vacation so I am posting on his behalf.
>
> We have included a base proposal with several optional components. The purpose of this document is to seed a discussion and we expect the discussion to drive improvements in the document.

Hi Adrian, Tony, et al.

I'm not actually a big fan of this proposal. Experience with
namespaces in XML has showed (at least to me) that namespaces are too
complex for authors to understand. The most recent example of this was
the discussion on RDFa+HTML where it was clear that even the experts
that developed RDFa thought of nodes as receiving their meaning from
their nodeName rather than from their localName+namespaceURI.

Additionally, the SVG working group is hard at work trying to get away
from exposing their users (SVG authors) to the SVG namespace. I'm
assuming that this is based on feedback from authors disliking the SVG
namespace.

Even the RDFa working group has moved away from the namespacing
mechanism that XML Namespaces is using. RDFa is based on CURIEs, which
is a compacted single string, rather than the string-tuple that XML
Namespaces force upon users.

Similarly the DOM Level 3 Events spec recently decided to drop the use
of name+namespace tuple inspired by XML Namespaces, and instead chose
to use a single string to identify Events.

So all in all it feels like momentum is moving away from the XML
Namespaces model, rather than towards it.

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".

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 30 September 2009 23:09:58 UTC