[whatwg] The problems with namespaces in text/html

Elliotte Harold elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Sat Nov 4 14:23:52 PST 2006


Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Sat, 04 Nov 2006 22:56:35 +0100, Elliotte Harold 
> <elharo at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
>>> I've no idea about XForms, but the plan for MathML is that you can 
>>> write it without bothering about namespaces, but that it ends up 
>>> having namespaces in the DOM.

Like hell it doesn't matter! A DOM doesn't travel over the network. The 
serialized form does. The DOM is one possible local model used to 
process the document on one system. My tools may or may not be based on 
the DOM, but they're going to start by receiving an actual XML instance. 
We can use TagSoup to fudge HTML, but if you I want to handle MathML, 
SVG, and other things in it, That instance had better be namespace 
well-formed, and it had better use the right names for the right things, 
both local and qualified.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/



More information about the whatwg mailing list