On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:25:11 +0100, Chris Wilson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't care about the particular conclusion. For the purposes of
interoperability across implementations (and that IS the point of
creating a standard, right?) I believe it absolutely should be defined,
and is the issue of the WebAPI WG - unless you don't really care about
interoperability, in which case I'm not sure I see the point of having a
standard to begin with.
Euhmmm... I care about interoperability, a lot. It's sort of my day job to
care about that. I'm just saying it's not our issue. It depends on HTML is
reflected in the DOM. That requires someone to specify how you transform
HTML into a DOM. I explained that the HTML5 proposal did that and how it
did that. I think it's out of scope of the Selectors API specification to
define how you convert a string of HTML into a DOM. (The methods from the
Selectors API operate on a DOM.)
In general you don't need to use the namespaces by the way. Certainly not
for HTML. You would just do:
document.matchAll("div.example, div.examples")
which will match the <div> element in any namespace with either a class
"example" or "examples" which is fine for HTML.
Look, I've been involved in developing a lot of the W3C standards that
the web development community relies on today - HTML, DOM, CSS, XSL -
and I can say without reservation the biggest lesson I've learned about
building a durable standard on which multiple interoperable
implementations can be built is that you must think about the edge cases
and capture them in the standard as early as possible. Otherwise you
end up with a debacle[1] like CSS, where the original version is so
loosely defined that it can be interpreted in many different ways, and
you progressively introduce detail into later versions of the spec (or
have wildly incompatible implementations), screwing the early
implementers and adopters along the way (hi there).
Yeah, I think every reasonable person agrees with this :-)
A very senior person in IE's development in the past repeatedly stated
to me that he didn't believe that there would ever be truly
interoperable DOM implementations, because (e.g.) getting the event
timing perfectly the same was nearly impossible - there would always be
timing differences or whatever. Let's prove him wrong. Designing loose
standards doesn't help.
And with this too!
--
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>
