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

[Tim Bray]

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.

Just wanted to place on the record the fact that I agree totally with
David.  Since an HTML <p> or <h2> or <br> has the same import for 99.99999%
of applications that care about this tag vocabulary at all (yes, Ann, even
if it says align='center'), it's just nuts to make them pretend that HTML
is three different languages.  Which implies that every futher tiny little
enhancement to HTML, from now to the end of time, is going to get its own
namespace.  Which means that I, as a programmer, can *NEVER EVER EVER*
write code that says 

if (elementType() == 'a' and elementNamespace() == 'HTML')
  doHTMLHyperlink()

and hope to have it continue working in the face of future versions of
HTML - which, we can be reasonably sure, will continue to have <A> elements
with relatively comparable meaning to those of today.

This is just wrong.  -Tim

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