Re: Verbosity of XHTML 2

My thoughts on the issue of user agents and the dtd, namespaces et al.

a) If a user agent supports XHTML 2.0 then it will know about these 
fixed attributes and it won't matter.

b) If a user-agent doesn't know XHTML 2.0 but knows XML it should be 
able to retrieve the DTD and use that...

But really... who is going to use a user agent that doesn't support 
xhtml to view xhtml 2.0? Also going with default xlink attributes so 
that authors only have to type in xlink:hnref has the advantage that 
it's super easy to teach to current authors, and browsers which don't 
support xlink can still look for xlink:href and check that it's the 
normal type and treat it as a normal href... realistically though with 
all the changes in the spec any browser which doesn't support XHTML 2.0 
is going to be pretty damn useless for viewing it for anything but the 
most trivial tasks anyway.

Yes, authors will have to write a lot of namespace declarations out, but 
anyone who is authoring in such a way that this matters will have a 
decent editor which will support templates -- they'll never have to type 
it out again.

Also, I don't believe that the namespaces will confuse authors. 
Introduce it to them by saying you just use xlink:href instead of href. 
Then later on when they're used to those basic uses you can explain to 
them what they are and point out how easy they are since the person has 
already been using them. And anyone who doesn't understand namespaces 
probably won't be using XHTML 2.0 for a while anyway -- certainly not 
until such a time when there's plenty of tutorials and example pages out 
there for them to learn from /copy off.

-- 
Lach
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Web: http://illuminosity.net/
E-mail: lach@illuminosity.net
MSN: luminosity @ members.evolt.org
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Received on Monday, 12 August 2002 08:17:14 UTC