On Apr 6, 2009, at 18:31, [email protected] wrote:
Just to answer a couple of your points and questions, and then let's
take it to
private e-mail or whatwg or some such since a bug tracking system
isn't the
right place for a debate.
CCed www-archive.
The specific step I would like to see happen is for HTML 5 to
mandate namespace
well-formedness and require draconian error handling.
That's not feasible, because any browser implementing Draconian
handling would lose market share.
I am simply not convinced by the numerous arguments made against
that simple step.
If you are not convinced by the all-encompassing mess that text/html
is that it can't be processed in a Draconian way in the general case,
I don't know what I could say to convince you.
However I realize that this is not the direction the WhatWG is going
to go.
Fine. Maybe you're even right. In that case, I want the WhatWg to stop
pretending that HTML is really XML and that it can use XML-specs
like XPath. It
can't. They don't work with non-namespace well-formed documents.
Please stop
trying to pollute useful, relatively sensible specs like XPath 1.0
with ugly
kludges to support one special case.
Pretending that the data models of XML and HTML are more different
than they are is what caused the architectural inconsistencies in the
first place. The trees aren't really that different, and it's silly to
maintain gratuitous differences between the namespace and the local
name case between the HTML and XHTML trees. And XML technologies other
than parsers operate on the trees--not on the syntax that goes over
the wire making those technologies applicable to trees originating
from text/html bytes as well.
If you parse text/html into a XOM tree using the Validator.nu HTML
Parser, you can use XPath on the tree if you write your expressions so
that the element name expressions are in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
namespace. That's how I want things to work in browsers, too, in the
future: that you can write unified http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml-namespace
XPath expressions that work on both HTML and XHTML DOMs.
However, the document.evaluate() API has been out there for a long
time. A browser that ships the document.evaluate() API must make no-
namespace expressions match HTML nodes for compatibility with existing
content. If document.evaluate() hadn't been shipped yet, we could
change this, but the cat is already out of the bag.
--
Henri Sivonen
[email protected]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
