Should svg work in less strict html5 documents with an html mime-type?

I've noticed that when inserting svg into an html 5 document !DOCTYPE HTML  that svg will not work.
Instead, I have to name the file  file.xhtml and use an xml document with an explicit xhtml namespace (for the html portions) and an explicit svg namespace (for the svg portions).
 
 
The following does not work:
file.html
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<body>
<svg>
<rect>
 
 
Now, I know that HTML does not follow strict xml rules, whereas SVG does.  However, the html5 specs say that svg is supposed to be a valid element even in html documents.  It seems a little bit of a shame to have to turn all html documents into the more strict xml/xhtml conforming version just to use SVG.
 
It's probably just something that I don't understand... but I wanted to check anyways.

Received on Friday, 3 September 2010 00:21:41 UTC