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

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
>>>
>>> Right, Then I think it would be good if you could get some Authoring
>>> Tool companies on board, they'll have useful things to say I'm sure.
>>
>> This is an open mailing list. Anyone can post. (For what it's worth,
>> I'm aware of at least one authoring tool implementor on the list.)
>
> I suggested on the WG, not on the mailing list, the same as with the
> accessibility expertise.

How would that help? The "members" are just an oversight committee, like
W3C team is to the W3C. If you want the spec to improve, then we need
input on this mailing list, not new "members".


>>> Yes, but it doesn't - so I guess you're conceding there isn't one -
>>
>> That's a W3C issue, really.
>
> Not really, as the WHATWG obviously subscribes to the view (lots of my
> objections would be gone if you weren't stepping on XHTML toes)

I've only heard one objection to WHATWG describing extensions to XHTML,
yours. You haven't yet explained how extending the XHTML namespace is
worse than extending the text/html namespace or the DOM namespace.


>>> why not just an HTML vocabulary though (then you don't need to pollute
>>> namespaces you don't control)
>>
>> Because to UAs that implement both, there is no difference between
>> HTML4 and XHTML1.
>
> I don't agree with that!

Whether you agree to it or not is largely immaterial. XHTML and HTML are
implemented as one technology in Safari, Opera, and Mozilla, the only big
difference lies in the parser, with a few minor differences in the CSS and
DOM code to handle things like HTML-specific hacks that CSS says don't
apply to XML, and differences in the case sensitivity of XHTML vs HTML.
There are, in fact, more differences in the handling of HTML-in-quirks-
mode and HTML-in-standards-mode, than between HTML-in-standards-mode and
XHTML. So yeah. The two technologies are equivalent in UAs.


> Mozilla certainly does lots of awful things with application/xhtml+xml
> content that it doesn't do with HTML content.

Do you have any bug numbers? I'm not familiar with any awful bugs in this
area in Mozilla.


> In any case it's not an answer, indeed it's more of an argument for
> doing just one, since there's no different and UA's implement both.

I don't understand how "there is only one codebase to implement both" can
possibly be an argument for "the spec should extend only one". Could you
explain this in more detail?

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