Re: XHTML attributes and namespace, clarification needed

* Daniel Glazman wrote:
>I understand perfectly why we need namespaceless elements and attributes. But
>I don't feel XHTML attributes fall into that case. XHTML user agents recognize
>XHTML attributes as defined by the XHTML language, they act as if they were
>belonging to the XHTML namespace. Keeping XHTML attributes namespaceless means
>a semantic hack in user agents: "Oh, this has no namespace but it's an XHTML
>attribute, so we know what to do with it". In other terms, user agents act as
>if they had a hardcoded namespace for these attributes.

The attributes are "local" to their element, consider the type attribute
in HTML 4.01,

  <ul     type = '...'>
  <style  type = '...'>
  <input  type = '...'>
  <button type = '...'>

and consider the xml:lang attribute. The xml:lang attribute has the same
semantics regardless of what element it is attached to; this is not true
for the type attribute above, sometimes it is used to control the style
of an element, sometimes it indicates the stylesheet language, sometimes
it indicates what kind of input control an element should be. You have
certain expectations from namespace qualified attributes, that they have
"global" semantics rather than local semantics, this would not be true
for an XHTML 1.0 xhtml:type attribute.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Tuesday, 14 December 2004 13:14:41 UTC