Re: null namespace Re: Next steps for the ARIA syntax discussion

Robert J Burns wrote:
>>  img[src]
>
> I don't see how that would break. Not specifying a namespace does not 
> imply null namespace, does it?

It does in CSS3 Namespaces for attribute selectors.  Not for element selectors.

> • CSS that expected null namespace (I haven't read the draft CSS 
> namespace thoroughly, so I don't even know how an author specified the 
> null namespace for attributes or elements)

Please take a read at it.

> • Perhaps some DOM methods, but I can't think of any effected by 
> changing the null namespace to instead a means for scoping

   setAttributeNS("", "foo").

> Also, using CSS to select elements are much greater than using them with 
> attribute selectors. So if it works now with element selectors and XML 
> namespaces then there's no reason it couldn't work the same for attributes.

Again, if _all_ the specifications got changed all at once some of these issues 
could be mitigated.  That's not going to happen, though.

>> So setAttribute should either not follow the DOM spec or the DOM spec 
>> should be changed?
> 
> The browsers are not following the DOM spec now in terms of namespaces,

The only such example I know of is createElement() in XHTML documents.  Since 
your worries are about multi-language documents, where that's not a problem, I'm 
not sure where your "not following the DOM spec" claim comes from.

-Boris