Is this introducing incompatibilities with future W3C work? (Was: [whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 Editorial [minor] Abstract -> Section 2)

[Jim Ley]

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 16:18:46 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> >
> > So it is the intention of Web Forms 2.0 to extend the XHTML namespace,
> > not caring that the WHATWG do not have change control over that
> > namespace and specifically introducing incompatibilities with any future
> > XHTML specification the W3C may wish to introduce?
> 
> Yes, pretty much.

Thanks for the clarification, I am disgusted, and I am disgusted with
Opera, Apples and Mozilla involvement in this deliberate subversion of
internet standards, whilst namespaces were perhaps not the best idea
in the first place, we have them now, and we should ensure that they
work.

> Note that there is nothing worse about extending XHTML1's namespace than
> there is over extending HTML4. 

There are many different types of HTML rendered by User Agents today,
and extended with all sorts of type of element. There is no problem
with publishing your own DTD with elements with the same name as HTML
4 elements, lots of people have done it, including me.

If you want to extend XHTML though, the standard way is
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/

> Similarly, DOM extensions such as the extremely popular "as used by GMail"
> object XMLHttpRequest polute the DOM namespace in the same way.

The XMLHttpRequest object is NOT a DOM extension, it's part of the
Application Object Model provided by the UA.  I assume this confusion
as to what it is, is why Opera has so far failed to implement it...  
Just like the extensions to DOM that Opera etc. have been using for
years like window.alert and similar.   These are not DOM methods, they
don't act on the _document_.

I expected a much better argument from the WHATWG to have been agreed
on, than "we don't care much about internet standards".

Jim.