Re: xmlns in HTML5 (was: Telecon Agenda- Thursday 1500 UTC)

On Thu, 16 Jul 2009, Toby Inkster wrote:
> 
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> > Authors must not use elements, attributes, and attribute values that
> > are not permitted by this specification or other applicable
> > specifications.
> >  -- http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#semantics-0
> 
> Which "other specifications" are "applicable"?

Pretty much any that claim to be and that the people affected agree are 
applicable. If an RDFa specification said that text/html could have 
arbitrary xmlns:* attributes, then the HTML5 specification would (by 
virtue of the above-quoted sentence) defer to it and thus it would be 
allowed. Similarly, Microsoft could write a spec and claim <marquee> is 
valid, as well as <msword> and <excel>.

Of course, if a community doesn't acknowledge the authority of such a 
spec, and they _do_ acknowledge the authority of the HTML5 spec, then it 
would be (for them) as if that spec didn't exist. Similarly, there might 
be a community that only acknowledges the HTML4 spec and doesn't consider 
HTML5 to be relevant, in which case for them, HTML5 isn't relevant.

This is how specs work. :-)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 16 July 2009 09:21:03 UTC