XHTML namespace and forwards compatibility

XHTML 1.0 defines the namespace "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1" [1].
However, if a future draft of XHTML defines the namespace
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2", then it seems to me that this namespace
could (probably even should) go unrecognized by clients that recognized
the XHTML 1.0 namespace (at least in documents with a MIME type of
text/xml).

Perhaps there should be some sort of rule defined now that says what
future namespace names will be used.  Thus, rules for forward-compatible
parsing, like those in the XSLT draft [2], could be defined.

I fear that, without a clear statement of what should be accepted as an
HTML-in-XML namespace, different clients will try to guess whether
something is HTML in different ways (such as looking for the namespace
prefix "html").  This would be a disaster.

David

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#docconf
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xslt#forwards

Received on Thursday, 20 May 1999 23:31:36 UTC