- From: Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:39:35 +0900
- To: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- Cc: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, David Orchard <orchard@pacificspirit.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, www-tag@w3.org
"Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, 2009-02-10 20:26 +0000: > But I think the world has already voted with its feet on the XML5 > question, in that there is a notable _lack_ of folk advocating it. Regarding the world voting with its feet: As far as the Web goes at least, it would seem that it's instead really been a matter of the vast majority of content providers voting against XML/XHTML completely and voting for HTML instead (by choosing to serve non-WF HTML, and by choosing to serve XHTML as text/html so that it gets processed by HTML parsers in browsers instead of by XML parsers in browsers). Anyway, in my world at least, there are plenty of people advocating for a saner way to handle XML on the Web. They may not be calling it "XML5" -- because many or most of them even don't know or care what XML is. All that they know is that they have Web sites they depend on, and they want those Web sites to work correctly and remain accessible to them. Look through the bug database for any browser project and I think you'll find that there are many end users (not developers -- but normal end users of sites) who are not particularly happy when they try to access a site they need to use and find that it has become completely inaccessible (because of a minor XML WF error). And, anyway, many sites gave up completely on serving real XML a long time ago -- after finding it not particularly good for business to risk having their sites become completely inaccessible to users because of such problems. So it's not really a matter of lack of folks advocating for XML5 -- it's lack of them advocating for XML on the Web at all, in any form. All that said, I do think there are many content providers and developers who would really like to getting the potential benefits of XML on the Web without getting stuck with the liabilities -- in particular the fatal-by-design liability of catch-fire-and-fail error handling. > And there's good reason for that: XML actually _is_ usable by > authors and authoring well-formed XML is _not_ hard. I'll agree that authoring WF XML is not hard at all. It's also not hard at all to programatically generate WF XML. But it's not simply a matter of authoring or generating XML. In fact, authoring and generating XML aren't the issue at all. The issue is actually putting it out on the real Web and pulling it out from the real Web into your own content. As has been pointed out many times before, the real problems come when you actually need to also handle real Web content that you don't have complete control over yourself. To pick one: A key problem case that's been cited many times is the case of making sure that a part your site is not going to become completely inaccessible just because one user comes in and inserts a comment with some malformed markup instance in it that their scrubber was not configured to deal with. And if you say it's not hard to anticipate the possible errors and catch them... well, I'd have to say I know a few very sharp people who have found otherwise. --Mike -- Michael(tm) Smith http://people.w3.org/mike/
Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 23:39:51 UTC