xmlns:html="foo" - a cross-browser solution?

[Lisa Rein]

Idea:

Right now, millions of confused HTML authors are anxiously waiting to
use namespaces, even though most of them are not sure why.  
I'm not usually one to give HTML special treatment :-), but it might be
worthwhile in this case:  there are a billion versions of the HTML specs
out there, all those HTML Doctypes addresses, W3C website addresses for
the specs themselves, and whatever else someone might mistake for the
correct URI value (should one ever be chosen).  

With all this in mind, how can we just pick out a single HTML NameSpace
URI amongst ourselves during one holiday-ish afternoon on a mailing list
and then expect for that value (or any other single value) to be
wholeheartedly "adopted" by every past, present, and future follower?

That gave me an idea:  What about allowing ANY unique URI value to be
declared within the html namespace; they would just be used for
rendering well-formed HTML from within a browser (all it really should
be used for anyway)...

This way, the IE5+ and Mozilla 5+ html namespace declarations could at
least be made compatible -- next time around -- no excuses :-) 

Something like this:

<webpage xmlns="http://www.mytagset.com"
         xmlns:html="http://www.aolownusnow.com/mozilla/html/whatever" >
or 

<webpage xmlns="http://www.mytagset.com"
         xmlns:html="http://www.aolareourpals.com/ie/html/whatever" >

Which is really just this to their respective, embedded processors:

<webpage xmlns="http://www.mytagset.com"
         xmlns:html="foo" >


Since each browsers' HTML display behavior is essentially hardcoded in,
making its rendering behavior effectively application-specific anyhow. 
Wouldn't it at least be helpful to have that next time around thing
cleared up?

This would also make things "easy" for all walks of HTML authors -- and
keep things backwards-and-forwards-compatible.

Would this create other problems I haven't thought of yet?  

2. And we are NOT talking about XHTML, right?  XHTML is the components
made up of well-defined collections of HTML elements, and XHTML must
have an explicitly-defined Namespace, etc.....

Right? :-)

thanks,

lisa


Don Park wrote:
> 
> Both Tim Bray and David Megginson proposed we settle on the Namespace URI
> for HTML.  I think this is a clear enough and small enough task for us
> (XML-DEV) to accomplish here and now.
> 
> Here are some candidates:
> 
> 1) "http://www.w3.org/Markup/" - by David Megginson
> 2) "http://www.w3.org/HTML/1999/namespace" - by Tim Bray
> 3) "http://www.w3.org/HTML/2000/Namespace" - by Don Park (I like zeros :)
> 
> Lets just settle on one and start using it.  If W3C balks, we can go with:
> 
> 4) "http://www.xml.org/HTML/2000/Namespace" - (if Jon Bosak agrees)
> 
> Signup by replying with one of the numbered options.
> 
> If you are against this proposal, select this:
> 
> 0) "hell://no.stinking.namespace/4/HTML"
> 
> Best,
> 
> Don Park    -   mailto:donpark at docuverse.com
> Docuverse   -   http://www.docuverse.com
> 
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