[whatwg] Re: Is this introducing incompatibilities with future W3C work

[Jim Ley]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:44:53 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> The WHATWG principles are laid out here:
> 
>   http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html

So you're now conceding that this is an Opera thing, not 7 guys who
don't recognise companies?  We've still not had any patent etc. info.

>   * The core features of an XML vocabulary should require the use of
>     elements from only one namespace.

You never really explained why this constraint existed, IE does
support multiple namespaces (regardless of the legality in authoring
such docs) so it's not based on an IE6 legacy requirement, which is
what I understood the main motivation of WF2 was.

> The net effect of these two points, both of which underpin all WHATWG
> work, is that anything added to HTML4 must be added to XHTML1, and that
> anything added to XHTML1 must not require namespaces to be used.

Rather depressing.  no-one's yet explained how HTML 4 and XHTML 1
really create a migration path, could you explain now perhaps?

> > The XMLHttpRequest object is NOT a DOM extension, it's part of the
> > Application Object Model provided by the UA.
> 
> You can call it that if it makes you feel better, but it still polutes the
> same namespace.

No it doesn't, well it may do in Mozilla's implementation, but for IE
it's just a normal object available to javascript in all its script
hosts, it's got nothing to do with HTML or other documents.

> > I expected a much better argument from the WHATWG to have been agreed
> > on, than "we don't care much about internet standards".
> 
> Don't forget that all this WHATWG work is intended to be submitted to a
> standards organisation; like PNG was, for instance.

Yes, but you've still not told us the roadmap, perhaps if you made all
that clearer you might get a little more support.

Jim.