Re: XHTML namespace and forwards compatibility

On Thu, 20 May 1999, L. David Baron wrote:

> 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.

I think the solution will emerge from ongoing work on XHTML document
profiles. The media type and/or namespace by themselves won't scale
when we consider all the variants needed to match the increasing
diversity of browser platforms.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Friday, 21 May 1999 15:54:03 UTC