- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 12:05:12 -0800
- To: www-html-editor@w3.org
Looks sensible, top to bottom. What worries me is 3.1, list item 3:
3.The root element of the document must designate one of three defined
namespaces by using the xmlns attribute [XMLNAMES]. The namespace
designated must match that of the DTD that the document purports to
validate against. The defined namespaces are:
http://www.w3.org/Profiles/xhtml1-strict.dtd
http://www.w3.org/Profiles/xhtml1-transitional.dtd
http://www.w3.org/Profiles/xhtml1-frameset.dtd
This seems really unfortunate to me. The #1 function of namespaces
is so that programmers can find the pieces of information they
need to process. So suppose I'm writing a web-crawler, and I
am plowing through a variety of HTML and XML documents, following
<A> links. What namespace should I check for? I.e. in my crawler code,
do I have to check 3 namespaces for every <A> element to see if
it's an HTML <A> as opposed to some other <A>? It seems to me that
for a large majority of elements, what programmers are going to
want to know is "is this HTML?". So the costs of having multiple
namespaces for the same thing are obvious. What I don't know is,
are there corresponding benefits? -Tim
Received on Wednesday, 24 February 1999 15:05:23 UTC