> To me, it is glaringly obvious that a standards organization should > leverage whatever tools are available to ensure that the technologies it > defines are robust and extensible. In the realm of angle-bracket markup > languages, the relevant tools are XML namespaces along with a proper schema > definition using XML Schema or RelaxNG. These XML tools prevent ambiguities > in the language definition and provide a clear definition of extensibility > points for both the language design committee (W3C in this case) and 3rd > parties who need to add their own elements and attributes due to the special > requirements of their workflows. (Note that HTML/HTML5 is a special case > where the world has gone through a hugely expensive and inefficient process > of recreating quirks found in leading implementations in order to achieve a > reasonably useful defacto standard.) > Agreed.
> My primary reason for recommending the use of namespaces and schema is > mainly from a language design perspective. It's the proper way to design > languages. However, that doesn't mean that clients have to enforce all or > any of the formal language mechanisms. For example, it is unusual that > clients perform validation. The big question is whether to require > well-formedness checks in the client. I would recommend yes because I don't > think we want to launch another decades-long effort to cross-replicate the > quirks from other widget clients. Widget designers are capable of learning > that they need to use quotes on attributes and have close tags for every > start tag versus all of the other things they need to learn to create a > widget. > > Thanks for asking. > Thanks for responding. The spec again reads: [.. Configuration document A configuration document is an [XML] document that has a widget element at its root. The namespace of all the configuration document elements must be: http://www.w3.org/ns/widgets ..] Kind regards, -- Marcos Caceres http://datadriven.com.au
