Re: <spoiler> element

Anne van Kesteren schreef:
>>> Shall we try one more "XLink in XHTML 2.0"?
>>> Count my vote. - But I'm afraid I'm too late. Again. :-(
>
> They tried this more or less with SVG. It seems that nobody really 
> understood
> the concept of namespaces. Lots of ocntent out there uses 
> xlink:href="" where
> xlink is bound to no namespace. The leading product simply assumes 
> that it is
> bound to http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink ignoring the fact that the 
> document is
> non namespace-well-formed.

Oh, what a nonsense! SVG documents are seldom hand-authored, so no-one 
ever deals with xlink.

No, the cause of the abuse of the xlink prefix is *exactly* that the 
leading product doesn’t have a proper XML parser (fyi: it accepts more 
things that are invalid XML, such as <circle> without closing /), and 
that because of that authoring tools can (and do) get away with 
generating invalid XML. The whole point of XML having strict error 
handling is to avoid problems like this.

So the problem you mention isn’t a problem of SVG (or well, it has 
become one), nor an authoring problem with regard to namespaces, as you 
claim it is, but a problem of broken XML parser implementations which 
ignore the standard. Actually, we can’t really call them XML parsers. 
They’re more like ‘X-markup with arbitrary error handling’ parsers.

HTML inherently has this problem. XML languages don’t, but this once 
again demonstrates that the parsers really really need to do strict 
processing for that to work. If they don’t, there’s no point in using 
XML at all.


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.

Received on Friday, 9 December 2005 22:07:20 UTC