[whatwg] The problems with namespaces in text/html (Was: MathML-in-HTML5)

[Henri Sivonen]

On Nov 4, 2006, at 13:15, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> We need namespaces. XML tools just don't work without them, and XML  
> tools are about the only thing most developers not working for  
> browser vendors have that can process this stuff. In fact, I think  
> developers have voted with their feet to adopt the XML toolchain as  
> the sensible way to process HTML.

I think that text/html conformance needs to be defined in such a way  
that everything that is meaningful can be conveyed through the SAX2  
ContentHandler interface (with qNames ignored) without violating any  
explicit or implicit parts of the API contract. It is unfortunate  
that the spec needs to focus on the DOM, because it is too late to  
replace the DOM in browsers with something less broken.

For interop, the behavior of browsers is specified to violate XML API  
contracts when it comes to non-conforming documents. The main problem  
that I see is writing the requirements for non-browser UAs in such a  
way that XML 1.0-based API contracts do not need to be violated but  
interop isn't harmed too much.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/