Multiple namespaces for HTML... why?

[james anderson]

there were some notes on this topic back several weeks ago. my reading was
that, for certain element types - those which would otherwise share a name,
but are declared with different content models, the desire was to distinguish
the names by virtue of their namespace.

those elements which do have the same model are, on the other hand, an
argument against this.

from some viewpoints, these latter are an argument for the ability to inherit
names among namespaces, but that's another story.

the same issue may reappear once folks start dealing with versioning.

Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> 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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