[whatwg] markup as authored in practice

[Robert Sayre]

On 12/2/06, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> If we can only use technologies such as MathML and SVG in XHTML (as
> application/xhtml+xml of course), those technologies are dead in the water.
>

I believe this is the main point of the thread. No one expects the
WHATWG community to care about these technologies, but I don't see why
the HTML5 spec should actively prevent their use.

<http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/12/01/The-White-Pebble#c1165018476>

  It would not take much to add an "if the element has an 'xmlns'
attribute" to the "A start tag token
  not covered by the previous entries" state in "How to handle tokens
in the main phase" section
  of the document.

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> Yes, that's extremely harmful.  XML syntax cannot and must not be used in HTML documents!

Did I use XML syntax?

> 1. It gives the false impression that namespaces actually work in HTML.

Sort of. No one understands namespaces, so that is not a problem.
Besides, the UAs will not give that impression.

> 2. XML languages, like SVG and MathML, require XML parsing.

SVG and MathML have a DOM. It wouldn't be that hard to serialize it as HTML5.

> 3. Well-formedness constraints do not apply in HTML, which would only
> help turn XML into another form of tag soup.  (IE's disastrous XML Data
> Islands and Custom Tags provide sufficient evidence of that.)

It won't turn XML into tag soup, since it won't be XML.

> 4. I doubt that HTML parsing requirements for unknown elements would be
> completely compatible with it.

We are still writing those requirements, so we'll have to see.

-- 

Robert Sayre