- From: Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl>
- Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:48:31 +0100
- To: Anne van Kesteren <fora@annevankesteren.nl>
- Cc: W3C HTML List <www-html@w3.org>
Anne van Kesteren schreef: >>> 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. > > The people who wrote the SVG authoring tools had to deal with XLink. > The people > who do handwrite SVG have to deal with it. And both mostly fail. I'm > not sure > what your point regarding "nonsense" is as I'm simply telling what Opera > encountered and I believe Mozilla encountered as well. > > That there is one implementation based on the fact that the DTD presets > xmlns:xlink and xmlns, well... The documents do validate, for example... Well, yes, they should never have done that. But that’s another issue. >> 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 what again was nonsense? I believe I pointed this out... My impression was that you were talking about hand-authoring of XLink. Hand-authoring would often be the case for XHTML, and I agree that generally people know too little about namespaces to properly apply them. However, I think the comparison with Adobe’s SVG implementation is off, the situation is quite different. It’s is not an authoring problem. At least from UA implementors I would expect them to understand such basic XML concepts, and I really can’t understand how the Adobe SVG reader’s current situation could ever arise. The fact that authoring tools (or the occasional hand-author) generate non-well-formed XML is not caused by namespaces, but by the broken parser implementation of such a mayor player and by the specification having the SVG and XLink namespaces be implied in the DTD. Anyways, as I said above, for the case of XHTML I absolutely agree with you that having to use different namespaces in common markup is not a good idea. ~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 22:50:21 UTC