Ian Hickson wrote:
On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Sam Ruby wrote:
xmlns attributes are invalid on HTML elements except html, and
when found on unrecognized [elements] imply style="display:none"
unless you recognize the value of this attribute.
There are millions of documents that would be "broken" by such a rule,
so browser vendors couldn't actually deploy that, sadly. :-(
Can you identify three independently produced ones?
Sure. Here's one (many pages on that site have this problem):
http://forskningsbasen.deff.dk/ddf/rec.external?id=auc107991
It has a block at the bottom that says:
<copyright xmlns="" xml:lang="en">...<br>...<br>...</copyright>
(Note the cunning mixing of XML-like syntax with HTML-like syntax.)
Another:
http://www.cms.alaswaq.net/save_print.php?save=1&cont_id=4372
A large chunk of the text on this page is inside elements with xmlns=""
set (from what I can tell, all the text above the double up chevron button
thing is inside elements with xmlns="").
A third one:
http://www.homeaway.com/Varna/s/1453/fa/find.squery
This one has markup like this (I can just imagine how this happened):
<span>(<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fromRecord xmlns="http://wvrgroup.com/propertyom";>1</fromRecord> -
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<toRecord xmlns="http://wvrgroup.com/propertyom";>10</toRecord> of <?xml
version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<hitCount xmlns="http://wvrgroup.com/propertyom";>24</hitCount>)</span>
Again, important text (it's the "(1 - 10 of 24)" text at the top right,
clearly intended to be visible), which is wrapped in elements with
xmlns="" attributes.
That's three. I found dozens more (and I only checked a few thousand
pages at random), including:
http://ise.uvic.ca/Theater/sip/person/7639/main.html
The entire header text ("John Epstein") on that page is all inside an
element <display_name> which has an xmlns="" attribute.
http://global.yesasia.com/kr/artIdxDept.aspx/section-videos/code-c/aid-39826/
A bunch of snippets are inside elements with xmlns="".
http://intermezzo-weblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/o-caso-rondnia-e-mais.html
Not clear if it was intentional here, but some of the visible text at
the bottom right is in an xmlns="" block.
http://projects.teknowledge.com/DAML/Corpus/W/wrestling_match.html
Unclear what they thought was going on here too, but the text at the
top is inside an unknown element with xmlns="" set.
http://194.7.45.68/fr/item.php?text_id=51813&keyw=Snoop+Dogg
There are eight bazillion xmlns="" attributes in this file, but the
copyright in particular uses an unknown HTML element with xmlns="".
...and I'll stop here, because that should be enough to convince you. :-)
The common pattern that I see is that xmlns="".
- Sam Ruby
