On Thursday, April 14, 2005, at 06:04 AM, Bill de hÓra wrote:
I don't think is comes under the category of namespaces for versioning problem. We made this problem ourselves, due to the consensus view that says default namespaces are so valuable we have the bake an inverted dependency into Atom, ie the feature of having to have Atom know about XHTML to treat it special is arguably a design problem.
Looking at a Blogger-generated Atom 0.3 feed:
<content type="application/xhtml+xml" xml:base="http://antone.geckotribe.com/bustedworld/"; xml:space="preserve">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>The package for my son's diapers says "22-37 lbs", but there is <i>absolutely no way</i> they could hold that much stuff without leaking!</div>
</content>
...so we certainly didn't create the problem by requiring the div--xmlns attributes were being added to <div>s in Atom feeds before we came up with the idea. What we've discovered is that there is no way to make the XHTML namespace the default namespace while having the content be a valid XHTML fragment. We'd have to allow the <html> element inside of atom:content to do that. Other options include not worrying about whether the content is valid XHTML (though of course it must be well-formed XML), or only requiring that the content of the div be a valid XHTML fragment, and not the div itself, which, since the div isn't part of the content, wouldn't be entirely strange.
