[whatwg] The problems with namespaces in text/html

[Henri Sivonen]

On Nov 5, 2006, at 14:30, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
>> Personally, I think MathML is so hopelessly verbose for hand  
>> authoring that this really shouldn't be about enabling hand  
>> authoring MathML-in-HTML5 but about enabling MathML-in-HTML5  
>> (perhaps generated by a future version of itex2mml or similar) to  
>> be served through content management systems that are not built  
>> around a SAX pipeline or an XML tree API or XSLT but are built as  
>> tag soup systems and simply cannot guarantee well-formedness. I  
>> mean systems like WordPress and MovableType.
>
> Please don't confuse what these systems won't do with what they  
> can't do.  I personally wrote a system like this that maintained  
> full well-formedness at all times despite TagSoup input. In fact,  
> that was one of the easiest parts of what it did. See
>
> http://cafe.elharo.com/web/mokka/

http://hsivonen.iki.fi/validator/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fcafe.elharo.com% 
2Fweb%2Fmokka%2F&parser=xml&laxtype=yes

I think that makes my point for me.

> Today's tools and libraries make it easy for anyone using anything  
> more advanced than a text editor and FTP to publish well-formed  
> documents. Tools that don't do that by default should be fixed.

In order for a non-trivial tool to produce well-formed output  
consistently and reliably, the architecture of the tool needs to be  
designed with this goal in mind. It is remarkably difficult to make  
e.g. WordPress or MovableType emit stuff that is for sure suitable  
for serving as application/xhtml+xml.

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