Multiple namespaces for HTML... why?

[Tim Bray]

At 01:08 PM 2/24/99 -0500, Frank Boumphrey wrote:
>The new working draft for XHTML is available at
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-html-in-xml-19990224/

What I find weird is having three namespaces for HTML.  The costs of
this are obvious - every programmer who wants to, for example, process
HTML <A> or <FORM> elements is going to have to check each one against
three namespaces?  

I assume there must be some benefits to having 3 namespaces for
HTML, but they're not self-apparent. -Tim

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