RFP: Namespace URI for HTML

[Tim Bray]

At 01:24 AM 9/10/99 +0200, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer wrote:
>HTML is a damn useful vocabulary after all. Designing a completely 
>new XML language is often the only way. But sometimes, a new 
>application is rather a mixture of the features that HTML (or a 
>subset of HTML) already provides together with entirely new 
>features. In this case, one would re-use a subset of HTML in a new 
>XML language, forming a new XHTML family member. 

Exactly.  I suspect that 100% of the readers of this list agree 100%
with this contention.  In fact, this is already happening - people
are stealing chunks of HTML tags in other XML languages.  Good design, 
IMHO.

But, if I want, in my own XML language, to use an HTML table here and
an HTML hyperlink there, it seems to me the most natural thing in
the world to do this:

<myRootElement xmlns:html="the-namespace-URI-for-HTML">
  <myTag> ...
  <myOtherTag> ...
  <html:a href="adsafa;dfs">sfasafsdj</html:a>
  <yetAnotherTagOfMine> ...
  <html:table>
   <html:tr>...</html:tr></html:table>
  </myRootElement>

why on earth would I want different namespaces for all these different
HTML modules?  There is no possibility of collisions since they're
all from HTML.  -Tim


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