Re: a recommendation - Received on Thursday, 18 April 2002 14:01:42 EDT

> [Original Message]
> From: Fastpitch Central - Bill <bill@fastpitchcentral.com>
>
> You said, "xml:base does not provide this level of redundancy.  "  But,
even
> if it did I would still stand by my suggestion.  There are hundreds of
> millions of "simple" websites that use <base . . . > and will likely use
> <base . . . > for decades.
>
> Personally I love XML when its used for RSS type functions.  I've also
> devised my own XML tags for sports before SportsML was devised.  But,
> "xml:base . . . " has never been needed in anything I've done so far. 
It's
> probably a wonderful thing - but I have no clue about it's use or value.

xml:base is the XML equivalent to the HTML <base> element.
Thus in XHTML:

<html xml:base="http://example.com" ...>
 <head ...>
   ...
 </head>
 ...
</html>

replaces what in HTML would be::

<html ...>
 <head ...>
  <base href="http://example.com">
  ...
 </head>
 ...
</html>

xml:base has the advantage of being able to be applied to any
element (and its children) instead of just the whole document as
<base> is.  Furthermore, I sincerely doubt there will be any further
official development of HTML as the W3C is concentrating its
efforts on XML based markup such as XHTML as opposed to
SGML based markup such as HTML.  This makes suggestions
that would apply to just HTML and not to XHTML extremely
unlikely to be adopted.  While I can understand this to a point,
I do wish that the W3C  would at least work on HTML
to add useful features to it from XHTML where appropriate,
especially when vendors have already done so.  For example,
I would love to see an HTML 4.1 that incorporated <ruby>.

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2003 11:23:18 UTC