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

Some relevant reading (although rather brief at the moment):

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/WhyNoNameSpaces

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> 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".

This sounds a lot like section 3 of the proposal.  If a proposal like
this were adopted, couldn't we allow namespaces, but say that they're
just a prefix like "foo:", and drop the association with URLs?
Hypothetically, you could have a problem if there were conflicts, but
in practice this doesn't arise very often (e.g., in CSS, as you note).
 The risk of that could be mitigated by having a central registry
that's, for instance, a wiki page.  The spec could require that all
namespace prefixes be registered there, and validators could check for
it.

I seem to recall that there have been objections to any form of
distributed extensibility, though.  UAs are supposed to get new
features specced, not make up their own syntax.  That's why data-*
must be ignored by user agents, for instance: "User agents must not
derive any implementation behavior from these attributes or values.
Specifications intended for user agents must not define these
attributes to have any meaningful values."
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/elements.html#embedding-custom-non-visible-data>.
 But I'll leave it for more qualified people to elaborate on that.

Received on Wednesday, 30 September 2009 23:19:50 UTC