[whatwg] Hacking away on forms ... (fwd)

Sun Sep 10 06:40:24 PDT 2006

Dave Raggett wrote:
> You can reproduce my tests by pointing your browser at:
> 
>   http://people.w3.org/~dsr/dom/test.html

OK, I have the discovered the reason for the discrepancy in our results. 
  Apparently IE handles exactly the same markup differently depending 
upon how it is added to the page.

If you load my test case [1] in IE, tests A through E are styled, but 
test F isn't.  This shows the following:

IE will only allow styling of elements with namespace prefixes that have 
been either explicitly or implicitly declared.

There are two ways to explicitly declare a namespace in IE:
1. <html xmlns:foo="http://example.org/foo">
2. <?xml:namespace prefix = foo ns = "http://example.org/foo" />

In both cases, the URI may be omitted.

When a "Custom Tag" (the name Microsoft have given elements with 
namespace prefixes in HTML) is added using either innerHTML or 
document.write(), the PI that declares the namespace will be implicitly 
generated using the prefix but with no actual namespace name.

This explains why I was getting different results using the Live DOM 
Viewer because it uses innerHTML to copy the markup from the text box to 
the rendering area.  That means that IE was implicitly declaring the 
namespace of all Custom Tags in my tests.

[1] http://lachy.id.au/dev/2006/09/custom-tags

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/