[whatwg] Comments on Web Forms 2.0

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > Actually, I am distributing one such tool myself. Is the tool 
> > > > > broken? http://iki.fi/hsivonen/php-utf8/
> > > > 
> > > > It depends. If it drops the BOM in the middle of the string, then 
> > > > yes.
> > > 
> > > It does. My reasoning was that the BOM could only occur in the 
> > > middle of a string as an artifact left there when concatenating 
> > > strings that start with the BOM.
> > 
> > This is incorrect, U+FEFF is a valid character in its own right 
> > (albeit deprecated in favour of U+2060) and is only the BOM if found 
> > at the start of a string.
> 
> Isn't it the point of deprecation that implementors may opt not to 
> support deprecated stuff?

It depends (the word "deprecate" doesn't imply this on its inverse; you 
have to check with each instance of a deprecation to find what the case 
is). However, in many cases, as, I believe, with U+FEFF, deprecation is 
intended to discourage potentially harmful or confusing use, without 
breaking backwards compatibility with existing content (and thus still 
requiring it of implementations).


> > The documents don't _need_ to be namespaced, they are all in one 
> > namespace and don't contain any content that could ever be from other 
> > namespaces. The only reason to use namespaces at all is, in fact, to 
> > support users of namespace-aware parsers.
> 
> Namespace-aware parsers work just fine with namespaceless documents.

Sure, but they work better when they have a namespace to hook into, 
because then the tool can do namespace-based dispatch.

Imagine loading one of these documents into an XML+CSS renderer. How would 
it know whether to use the Web Forms 2 stylesheet or the DocBook 
stylesheet? With a namespace, the answer is easy.


> > Ok, added:
> > 
> > While this section restricts the exact features of XML that a UA may 
> > use, these restrictions do not apply to the files used when seeding a 
> > form with initial values.
> > 
> > Is that ok?
> 
> OK.
> 
> (Still, limiting the choice of syntactic sugar in the submission format 
> has the feel of Appendix C to it.)

There aren't really any restrictions beyond not breaking XML 1.0 rules and 
being compatible with both non-namespace-aware and namespace-aware 
parsers. Which, of the remaining restrictions, did you want to remove?


> > The spec doesn't say what the recipient is supposed to do with 
> > _recognised_ elements or attributes, either. What servers do is pretty 
> > much up to the servers, not much we can do about it.
> 
> Attempts to influence the ad hoc works of the ViewSourceClan might 
> indeed be futile. However, what you write in the spec could influence 
> what the developers of server-side frameworks (eg. Struts) do.

It could, I guess. Did you have any particular ideas in mind? I don't 
really know what to add.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'