ATTN: Please comment on XHTML (before it's too late)

[Ann Navarro]

At 07:19 PM 8/28/99 -0400, David Megginson wrote:
>For those of you who haven't noticed, XHTML has gone to Proposed
>Recommendation (PR) status at the W3C:
>
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1
>
>Unlike the last XHTML Working Draft, this PR has reverted to defining
>*three* separate XHTML Namespace URIs (transitional, strict, and
>frameset) with the threat of more HTML Namespaces in the future.
>

It's no more of a "threat" than the "threat" of people creating their own
namespaces for any purpose, which is indeed the entire idea behind
namespaces. 

If three namespaces present such an insurmountable problem, perhaps again,
the current "implementation" of namespaces is at fault. 

>As a developer, I believe that this is a seriously broken idea: we
>need a single HTML Namespace URI so that we can identify and process
>HTML markup embedded in other document types;  if we have to check
>three or more qualified names just to figure out that we have an HTML
><p> element (and write three separate patterns in XSL, etc.) then
>we're in serious trouble.

Anyone creating a generic processor will still "have to check" a variety of
qualified names. This is not anything new or surprising brought about by
XHTML. This will happen anywhere XML is used in a truly open environment.

Ann


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