Inspired by a conversation with hsivonen in #whatwg, I spend some time
thinking about how we would design <template> for an XML world. One idea I
had was to put the elements inside the template into a namespace other than
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. For example, consider the following XML:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Title of document</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello!
<template xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2012/xhtml-template">
<script>
alert("This script will not run because of its namespace");
</script>
</template>
</body>
</html>
Unlike the existing "wormhole" <template> semantics, in this approach the
tags-and-text inside <template> would translate into DOM as usual for XML.
We'd get the "inert" behavior for free because we'd avoid defining any
behavior for elements in the
http://www.w3.org/2012/xhtml-templatenamespace (just as no behavior is
defined today).
Whatever mechanism instantiates the templates would then
create corresponding elements in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtmlnamespace, as usual.
Now that we have a working XML version of <template>, we can consider how
to port the element to HTML. Fortunately, that's easy. We just treat
<template> as triggering foreign content, analogous to how <svg> causes the
HTML parser to create elements in the http://www.w3.org/2000/svg namespace.
Adam
Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 16:20:47 UTC