On 4/10/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Sam Ruby</b> <<a href="mailto:rubys@intertwingly.net">rubys@intertwingly.net</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Instead of "starts with x_", how about "contains a colon"?<br><br>A conformance checker could ensure that there is a corresponding xmlns<br>declaration that applies here, and possibly even do additional
<br>verification if it recognizes the namespace.<br><br>An HTML5 parser would, of course, recover from references to<br>undeclared namespaces, placing the entire attribute name (including<br>the prefix and the colon) into the DOM in such situations.
<br></blockquote></div><br>I like the idea of prefixed attributes for that purpose. This shouldn't be an issue for text/html parsing.<br><a href="http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attributes0">http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attributes0
</a><br>That section doesn't explicitly allow colons in attribute names. A provision would need to be made for that, but only for text/html parsing<br><br>As for text/xml parsing, those prefixed attributes would need to belong to a namespace. Should there be a specific URI designated for these attributes - I suspect that allowing the author to make up his own namespace URNs whimsically is bad. Is there already a namespace URI for this purpose (
e.g. urn:private)? <br><br>Possibly causes more problems than it solves.<br><br>What about any attribute that starts with "_" as opposed to "x_"? I'm messing with designMode in Firefox right now, and it appears Firefox adds an attribute called "_moz_dirty" to certain elements for internal scripting purposes. Are there cases where other browsers do something similar? Is there already a convention in some applications similar to the "-xxx-" convension in CSS for this purpose?
<br>