[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Sam Ruby]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> It also doesn't work that well. I'd be interested to see what happened 
>> in IE if the SVG used the SVG 1.2 <textArea> feature. Or if it used the 
>> SVG <text> and <tSpan> features.
> 
> Case in point:
> 
>    http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/12/01/The-White-Pebble
> 
> In IE, there's some stray "XHTML HTML" and "XHTML HTML XML" text. This 
> isn't acceptable to most people. It certainly isn't something that it 
> would make sense to encourage. The worst possible outcome here would be 
> for browsers like IE to start trying to parse this "SVG" in text/html, 
> because the lack of any sensible parsing rules for it would guarentee that 
> we're faced with even more "tag soup", thus undoing all the work that the 
> HTML5 spec is trying to do to get us past that.

You are aware that I like to "tweak" IE users, right?

With the current technology, this could have been avoided with a single 
div and two lines of CSS.  And I am most capable of doing that.

In the longer run, I do believe that an architected simple rule like:

    xmlns attributes are invalid on HTML elements except html, and
    when found on unrecognized attributes imply style="display:none"
    unless you recognize the value of this attribute.

... would channel those with insane desires to make extensions into 
doing so in a manner that is harmless.  Such a rule might take a year or 
two to get widely deployed, but the worst feet-draggers won't be 
affected any worse than they were in the days when <table> was young.

- Sam Ruby