RE: Making <template> play nice with XML and tags-and-text

From: hsivonen@gmail.com [mailto:hsivonen@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Henri Sivonen
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2012 7:00 AM 
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Adam Barth <w3c@adambarth.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Adam Klein <adamk@chromium.org>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 9:19 AM, Adam Barth <w3c@adambarth.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> 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.

> 
> On the face of things, this seems a lot less scary than the wormhole
> model. I think this merits further exploration! Thank you!

Just to clarify, is what you find scary about the other model the lack of support for XML, or something more?

I've been under the impression we're trying to shield HTML developers from namespaces, so I'm a little concerned that this new proposal will move us in the opposite direction. Sure I'd like a proposal that works for XML too, but not if it means making the feature confusing for web developers.

> >> Also, the elements inside <template>, though they appear to be HTML,
> >> wouldn't have any of the IDL attributes one might expect, e.g., <a
> >> href="foo"></a> would have no "href" property in JS (nor would <img>
> >> have src, etc). They are, perhaps, too inert.
> 
> I think that's not a problem, because you're not supposed to mutate the
> template anyway. You're supposed to clone the template and then mutate
> the clone.

I agree cloning is the main use case (and will probably require a dedicated API since cloneNode won't cut it as-is), but I wouldn't rule out developers altering templates dynamically. Under those conditions this exposes a lot of subtle differences I think most developers won't expect or understand. 

- Tony

Received on Monday, 6 August 2012 18:45:28 UTC