[whatwg] The problems with namespaces in text/html

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 15:48:59 +0100, Elliotte Harold  
<elharo at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
>>> Browser vendors can handle XHTML now. It's a non-issue for them.
>>
>>  Working for one I can assure you it's very much an issue.
>
> Looking at http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/ it seems like you do a  
> pretty good job. :-)
>
> certainly there's new stuff in HTML 5 that will require new code to  
> support; but do you really think a few namespace prefixes will make it  
> harder to do that?

I have no idea how namespace prefixes would work in an HTML parser.  
Perhaps you can take a look at  
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#parsing and see what  
might need to be done to make that namespace prefix compatible? I  
personally don't really see value in adding any kind of namespace syntax  
to HTML.

Note that you can't rely on well-formedness in the parser and that you  
need to handle all error cases as well in a way that doesn't cause a  
"yellow screen of death" to be generated.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>