- From: Rafael Weinstein <rafaelw@google.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 10:57:37 -0700
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Cc: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, Webapps WG <public-webapps@w3.org>, Yehuda Katz <wycats@gmail.com>
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