[whatwg] Attribute for holding private data for scripting

[Jon Barnett]

On 4/10/07, Sam Ruby <rubys at intertwingly.net> wrote:

> Instead of "starts with x_", how about "contains a colon"?
>
> A conformance checker could ensure that there is a corresponding xmlns
> declaration that applies here, and possibly even do additional
> verification if it recognizes the namespace.
>
> An HTML5 parser would, of course, recover from references to
> undeclared namespaces, placing the entire attribute name (including
> the prefix and the colon) into the DOM in such situations.
>

I like the idea of prefixed attributes for that purpose.  This shouldn't be
an issue for text/html parsing.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attributes0
That section doesn't explicitly allow colons in attribute names.  A
provision would need to be made for that, but only for text/html parsing

As for text/xml parsing, those prefixed attributes would need to belong to a
namespace.  Should there be a specific URI designated for these attributes -
I suspect that allowing the author to make up his own namespace URNs
whimsically is bad.  Is there already a namespace URI for this purpose (e.g.
urn:private)?

Possibly causes more problems than it solves.

What about any attribute that starts with "_" as opposed to "x_"?  I'm
messing with designMode in Firefox right now, and it appears Firefox adds an
attribute called "_moz_dirty" to certain elements for internal scripting
purposes.  Are there cases where other browsers do something similar?  Is
there already a convention in some applications similar to the "-xxx-"
convension in CSS for this purpose?
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