Re: History Re: [webcomponents] Template element parser changes => Proposal for adding DocumentFragment.innerHTML

It was wrong for me to editorialize about SVG and MathML -- and
"punish" was very poor word choice. I apologize to anyone who was
insulted. It certainly wasn't my intent.

I should have just said that I'm frustrated with the world we've
arrived in WRT HTML vs XML and left it at that.

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 3:07 AM, Charles McCathieNevile
<chaals@opera.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 11 May 2012 10:55:27 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 7:45 PM, Rafael Weinstein <rafaelw@google.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm very much of a like mike with Henri here, in that I'm frustrated
>>> with the situation we're currently in WRT SVG & MathML & parsing
>>> foreign content in HTML, etc... In particular, I'm tempted to feel
>>> like SVG and MathML made this bed for themselves and they should now
>>> have to sleep in it.
>>
>>
>> I think that characterization is unfair to MathML.  The math working
>> group tried hard to avoid local name collisions with HTML.  They
>> didn't want to play namespace games.  As I understand it, they were
>> forced into a different namespace by W3C strategy tax arising from the
>> "NAMESPACE ALL THE THINGS!" attitude.
>
>
> Actually, I think even that is an unfair characterisation. At the time both
> these technologies were developed (mid-late 90s) everyone assumed that XML
> was the path of the future for everything, and that de-crentralised
> extensibility was a critical requirement for a powerful web platform.
>
> Given that scenario, it is unclear whether there is a better approach. The
> current HTML approach of "if it is important it will get into the mainline
> spec" effectively breaks the key extensibility assumption. Leading
> implementors like Adobe, SodiPodi and Inkscape all introduced namespaced
> content all over the SVG map - in many cases doing things that active SVG WG
> members thought were excessive. Likewise Microsoft Office (at the time
> probably as widespread as "web browsers" in general) introduced namespaced
> content all over HTML (IE didn't support XHTML).
>
> Seven years later, both of those assumptions came under attack from the
> nascent WHAT-WG approach to updating HTML - but unlike the case for HTML,
> where the market leader had clearly resisted implementing XHTML, SVG in
> particular was backed by a number of XML-happy engines. It was several more
> years before SVG and MathML were incorporated into HTML in a way that
> clearly made sense.
>
> Punishing people, or even ridiculing them, for using XML in the late 90s,
> seems counter-productive at best. Outside HTML even Microsoft - who were one
> of the big creative forces behind XML - were pushing it everywhere, it was
> considered de riguer for making the mobile web a possibility outside Opera
> (which supported it anyway, but didn't require it), and it had, and still
> has, huge deployment. It just failed on the "web browser" platform, for
> reasons that are far easier to see in hindsight than they were at the time.
>
> cheers
>
> Chaals
>
> --
> Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
>    je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan noen norsk
> http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Friday, 11 May 2012 17:58:08 UTC