XHTML 1.0 returned to HTML WG

Paul Prescod paul at prescod.net
Thu Nov 4 12:27:20 GMT 1999


David Megginson wrote:
> 
>   The XML Namespace for HTML is http://www.w3.org/1999/11/HTML/ and
>   all names are lower case.
> 
> (or whatever suits).  Really -- just give us a Namespace, and we'll
> do stuff you barely dare to dream about.  That way, they can work on
> XHTML itself, modules, and all that at leisure.

Sure. Without a conformance specification, they could add in features
like BLINK, LOOP and SHIFT. I don't see how having dozens of groups
using HTML incompatibly is "progress". After all, we've been doing it
for five years now WITHOUT an HTML namespace.

Let me be concrete. Let's say you're developing a whizzy app to display
HTMLish documents. Now half-way through a document you run into:

<html:table><html:title/></html:table>

And thanks to the one line spec, this is now legal. What the hell do you
do? How does one write whizzy apps to work with the HTML namespace? And
if it isn't possible, then WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE NAMPESPACE?? If you
want to use HTML elements in your specs, DO IT...name elements in your
domain the same as HTML's. You can tell them that you have my full
blessing to do so. If you want to define a useful HTML namespace with
conformance requirements, I encourage you to do that also.

 Paul Prescod

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