[whatwg] The problems with namespaces in text/html

[Henri Sivonen]

On Nov 5, 2006, at 16:35, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>> Well, the problem is that they would mean different things.  
>> Consider the following fragment:
>
> Meaning is in the eye of the beholder. In point of the fact, there  
> are a lot more than two different things the fragment you propose  
> might mean. Meaning is determined locally by each recipient for its  
> own unique purposes, which may or may not be anything close to what  
> the document producer expects.

Well, the whole point of having a spec is to give a mutual  
understanding to the producer and consumer of what the bytes mean.

> The syntax matters. If you give me the right well-formed syntax, I  
> can do what I need to do with it, as can others. If you give me  
> malformed syntax, working with the document gets a lot more  
> complicated. My concern is not from browser vendors on agreeing on  
> one interpretation that's somehow useful to them. It's making sure  
> that they don't in the process break everything else anyone else  
> might want to do with these documents.

Everyone who wishes to process HTML5 with XML tools is going to need  
an HTML5 parser that exposes an interface that makes the HTML5 parser  
look like an XML parser to the rest of the tool chain. The part of  
the XML tool chain that you can't use with HTML5 is the XML parser  
itself.

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