[whatwg] The problems with namespaces in text/html

[Henri Sivonen]

On Nov 5, 2006, at 15:54, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
>> The model in the browsers that matter is the DOM. Unfortunately.  
>> But it is too late to change it. And having even that level of  
>> interop is great.
>
> But as I keep saying, *it's not just browsers*. There's a lot more  
> happening on the Web than classic desktop browsers. A document  
> posted to the Web is available to all sorts of clients. Some of the  
> most interesting things happen when there's no human in the loop to  
> look at a browser.

If your app does not run scripts from the Web, you are exempt from  
using the DOM as the model.

Quoting the spec:
> User agents with no scripting support
>
>     Implementations that do not support scripting (or which have
>     their scripting features disabled) are exempt from supporting
>     the events and DOM interfaces mentioned in this specification.
>     For the parts of this specification that are defined in terms
>     of an events model or in terms of the DOM, such user agents
>     must still act as if events and the DOM were supported.

I predict that in practice many non-browser apps will be in violation  
of the last sentence, because their authors will see more value in  
being able to use a streaming API without buffering or in being able  
to decouple the parser from the tree builder than in having  
interoperable error recovery.

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