Ian Hickson wrote:
I'm not saying don't add MathML to HTML. I'm saying don't add namespace syntax to HTML.
Is this feasible? As much as I'd like this for ease of use, at some point or
other when enough things have been added to html, there will be conflicts.
Namespaces seem like the only way to avoid those conflicts, and there needs to
be some way of representing those namespaces.
Ian Hickson wrote:
In browsers today, the following:
<a href="test" xmlns=""> ... </a>
...is just a link. If we start supporting xmlns="" as it works in XML, but
in HTML, then literally millions of pages are going to suddenly have their
links stop working, because <a> in the "" namespace (as opposed to the
XHTML namespace), is not an HTML <a>, and thus isn't a link.
I've seen hundreds of thousands of occurances of bogus meaningless things
like this:
<br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40";>
...as well as many thousands of pages with xmlns="" values pointing to
their own sites (as opposed to any sort of half-sensible namespace).
Some pages even have completely bogus namespaces on the root <html>
element, which would make the entire page screw up. Even worse, Office
HTML, of which there is a LOT on the Web, uses namespaces in a way to
trigger IE to do one thing, but relies on the other browsers *not*
handling the namespaces to make sure it all works everywhere. (Like I said
earlier, I've worked with one browser vendor who tried implementing this
namespace thing before, and had to back out because it broke real content
in pretty fundamental ways.)
OUCH.
Is the list of bogus namespaces relatively confined? Would it be technically
feasible to enumerate the worst ones and say "ignore these"?
Are there any reasons besides ease of use and misuse in tag-soup content that
XML's namespace syntax shouldn't be added to HTML?
--
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>
