Re: TWO Change proposals for ISSUE-41 : Distributed Extensibility

Maciej Stachowiak, Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:18:24 -0700:

> I think Microdata and RDFa are good examples of standardized 
> extensions. However, as a browser engine developer, I would like the 
> ability to do vendor extensions (either experimental or not intended 
> for public Web content) without stepping on valuable shared 
> namespace. We have a decent way to do that with CSS properties using 
> the vendor prefix convention(*). It would be nice to have something 
> similar at the HTML level. It seems like Rob's proposals (either X or 
> Y) would provide ways to do that.

Rob states in proposal X that

]]Any document that parses correctly in both XML and HTML is guaranteed 
to parse to the same DOM tree.[[

However, in CSS, if I use -webkit-border-radius:5px; then this is 
something that only Webkit 
browsers see.

And the same seems to me to be the case w.r.t. vendor prefixes in HTML: 
If e.g. <div -webkit:attribute=""> is something that only Webkit 
understands, then it means that it is treated differently by Webkit 
compared to how other browsers treat it, probably because Webkit uses 
an internal namespaces which attach meaning to the -webkit prefix.

And hence, can we justifiably say that Webkit sees the same DOM as the 
other browsers see?

I am not against Rob's proposal because of *this*. I just think that we 
should realize that it is not a realistic requirement to says that all 
browsers should see the exact same DOM. And so, I think we should take 
into account, when defining distributed extensibility, that there must 
be some leeway in this regard. Both with regard to legacy browser 
support and with regard to cross-browser support.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 03:49:11 UTC