- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:31:21 +0300
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: www-archive <www-archive@w3.org>
On Oct 19, 2007, at 20:30, Dan Connolly wrote: > On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 13:41 +0300, Henri Sivonen wrote: >> It's not about not liking the current XML namespacing mechanism. It's >> about the current XML one being unsupported in already shipped text/ >> html implementations. It follows that introducing it now to text/html >> would create a scripting discrepancy between legacy and new browsers. >> We don't want that, so we are stuck with no Namespaces in XML-style >> namespaces in HTML. > > Perhaps you don't want that... I don't think I want that either... > but when you say "we don't want that", would you please clarify > which "we"? Perhaps cite a source? Wanting to minimize scripting differences between the HTML5 DOM and the XHTML5 DOM is one design goal behind HTML5. I'm not sure if it has been properly documented in the W3C space, but it is understood tacitly at least among the #whatwg regulars. For example, HTML5 says that the text/html parser should put elements in the http:// www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. This requirement makes sense if minimizing the scripting discrepancies between HTML5 and XHTML5 is taken as a design goal. Seeking to use the same browser engine code for both HTML and XHTML 1.x is a software development practice applied in Gecko, WebKit and (presumably) Opera. I'd point to issues that arise from scripting discrepancies (between IE and others) and that were pointed out as unwanted on the Wednesday telecon, but I now see that the minutes at http://www.w3.org/ 2007/10/17-aria-minutes.html don't capture this quite obviously enough to serve as a citation against scripting discrepancies. (I think it follows naturally that if "we" don't want discrepancies between IE and others today, we don't want similar discrepancies between other sets of browsers tomorrow.) (ARIA scripting in IE matters for using the ARIA states as styling hooks and in case AT reads the DOM.) > I have seen substantial lack of consensus about > what we want with respect to compatibility and versioning. > Re: HTML version issue summary? > From: David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com> > Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:16:58 -0700 > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/1408.html At least the actual principles that have guided HTML5 spec development so far include a principle that introducing new browser engine modes is bad and the new spec should be written in such a way that a browser that implements the new spec can use the code complying with the new spec to process existing standards-mode Web content. > The discussion of it in the context of design principles > doesn't seem to have converged, but perhaps I'm mis-reading > what you're saying? Perhaps you're appealing to something > covered in the compatibility section? > > http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-design-principles/ > Overview.html#compatibility It appears that the scripting/DOM-level unification of HTML5 and XHTML5 has not been properly documented as an explicit principle. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Saturday, 20 October 2007 16:31:40 UTC