Ian Hickson wrote:
As far as I can tell, the various problems that have been raised have now
been addressed. It is now possible to make an HTML5 document that is
parseable as XHTML5, such that you can't tell which it is without looking
at the MIME type (which of course you could ignore in your own toolchain).
HTML5 has an extension mechanism (used to great effect by the
microformats.org people, for example).
The other issue, supporting other vocabularies in HTML5, is an open issue,
but it will be addressed in due course. We need more implementation
experience first, and there are far more pressing problems.
There were various proposals involving how to process documents using
multiple parsers with fallback options, etc, but based on my conversations
with browser vendors, that wouldn't ever be widely supported. If you wish
to propose this for the spec, please get the browser vendors to implement
it first (as an experimental mode, e.g.), to demonstrate that they are
willing to do so.
In case there is anybody here who doesn't faithfully follow my blog
<grin>, I have prototyped MathML + SVG + XLINK in HTML4:
http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/12/05/HOWTO-Embed-MathML-and-SVG-into-HTML4
This lead Jacques Distler to modify his MovableType plugin:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001065.html
I figure that if the existing FireFox HTML4 parser has an existing test
suite then modifying the parser to obviate the need for the script is
likely only a weekend task. This could be designed in such a way that
it was only enabled as an about:config option. Where I would need help
with is in getting it into the codebase. (Robert? You listening?)
- Sam Ruby
