[whatwg] A Selector-based metadata proposal (was: Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for)

Fri May 22 07:44:32 PDT 2009

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 12:26 +0200, Eduard Pascual wrote:
> Are you calling the DOM Consistency Principle a "theoretical" or
> "aesthetic" argument?

Certainly not -- DOM consistency is a great idea. But given that the
HTML5 spec defines how the DOM is built, there's a very simple solution
to that -- HTML5 could simply mandate that:

	<html xmlns:foo="http://foo.example.com/">

generates an identical DOM representation in both XHTML5 and HTML5.
What's the problem with that? 

In existing implementations, there are differences, sure. But for the
most part, those differences are pretty small and obscure, and don't
actually effect real world code very much. e.g. the following code seems
to work fine in Opera, Firefox and Midori (a Webkit browser):

	http://buzzword.org.uk/2009/dom.html
	http://buzzword.org.uk/2009/dom.xhtml

The files are byte-for-byte identical (indeed, on disk, one is just a
symlink to the other).

-- 
Toby Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>