RFP: Namespace URI for HTML

Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer schnitz at overflow.de
Fri Sep 10 00:12:44 BST 1999


>  > Why not introduce a custom "variant indentification system" for 
>  > XHTML? Possible solution: re-introduce the version attribute on the 
>  > HTML root element specifying the XHTML variant. The problem here 
>  > are fragments. I want to include a piece of XHTML in a document 
>  > instance other than XHTML. 
> 
> Then why not allow the html:version attribute on *any* HTML element?
> Then you can specify version information for subtrees as well as for
> an entire HTML document.

This mechanism would then be similar to namespaces in design. 

You are suggesting that the namespace is the highest level of 
hierarchie, and every XML grammar that has multiple variants shall 
introduce its own mechanism to distinguish the variants as the 
second level below namespaces. XHTML is a language with quite 
some history. I a few years, it is likely that other XML grammars 
will have the same situation like HTML (SMIL, for instance). I feel 
unconfortable introducing such a mechanism now just for XHTML 
where it will be likely that a similar mechanism will be needed in 
different languages as well. In the end, the version attribute will be 
used in conjunction with the xmlns attribute for many popular 
languages. So then why have two mechanisms, where one is 
global and the other one is always language-specifc, but both
are in the same space.

Regards,

Sebastian



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