- From: <bugzilla@wiggum.w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:09:08 +0000
- To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6777
Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> changed:
What |Removed |Added
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CC| |elharo@metalab.unc.edu
--- Comment #8 from Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> 2009-04-06 14:09:08 ---
It is unreasonable to expect the XPath specification to request special
treatment for one class of documents. You are essentially proposing to fork the
XPath specification so that different rules apply depending on the input
document and the processor. The same result should entail whether an XPath
expression is evaluated by a DOM inside a browser or by an external processor
outside the browser not using the DOM at all. You are proposing that these two
cases would produce different results because one would understand the case of
an owner document and one would not.
This is an ugly idea that would significantly increase the complexity and
learning curve for XPath, as well as break much existing software that is
designed to process HTML documents using the current well-defined XPath data
model.
The correct solution is simple: require namespace well-formedness for HTML 5
documents. Until the spec takes that simple step, you're going to find yourself
asking for one special case after another. This is not the first and it will
not be the last.
Almost everything the W3C has done for the last 12 years has been predicated on
the notion of namespace well-formedness. You may be right that this was the
wrong decision, and that we need to throw out 12 years of deployed tools and
technologies and start over. However, don't expect that we can retrofit your
new model onto the existing stack. If HTML 5 won't accept namespace
well-formedness, then it's going to have to build its own replacements for
XPath, XQuery, etc. The existing ones just won't work.
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Received on Monday, 6 April 2009 14:09:18 UTC