[whatwg] We should not throw DOM Consistency and Infoset compatibility under the bus
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Fri Jan 11 12:00:07 PST 2013
On Fri, 11 Jan 2013, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> Hixie wrote in https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18669#c31 :
> > I think it's fine for this not to work in XML, or require XML changes,
> > or use an attribute like xml:component="" in XML. It's not going to be
> > used in XML much anyway in practice. I've already had browser vendors
> > ask me how they can just drop XML support; I don't think we can, at
> > least not currently, but that's the direction things are going in, not
> > the opposite.
>
> This attitude bothers me. A lot.
>
> I understand that supporting XML alongside HTML is mainly a burden for
> browser vendors and I understand that XML currently doesn't get much
> love from browser vendors.
Not just browser vendors. Authors rarely if ever use XML for HTML either.
> Still, I think that as long as browsers to support XHTML, we'd be worse
> off with the DOM-and-above parts of the HTML and XML implementations
> diverging.
Sure, but if on the long term, or even medium term, they don't continue to
support XHTML, this is no longer a problem.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting that they diverge beyond the syntax (which is
already a lost cause). All I've concretely proposed is syntax for binding
Web components in text/html; I haven't described how this should be
represented in the DOM, for instance. If we define <foo/bar> as being a
text/html syntactic shorthand for <foo xml:component="bar">, or <foo
xmlcomponent="bar">, in much the same way as we say that <svg> is a
shorthand for <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">, then the DOM
remains the same for both syntaxes, and (as far as I can tell) we're fine.
> The idea to stick a slash into the local name of an element in order to
> bind Web Components is much worse.
I don't propose to change the element's local name. <select/map> has
tagName "select" in my proposal.
> Please, let's not make that mistake.
What do you propose to resolve this problem then?
Some of the constraints are:
- The binding has to be done at element creation time
- The binding has to be immutable during element lifetime
- The syntax must not make authors think the binding is mutable
(hence why the <select is="map"> proposal was abandoned)
- The syntax must be as terse as possible
- The syntax has to convey the element's public semantics (a
specified HTML tag name) in the document markup, for legacy UAs
and future non-supporting UAs like spiders.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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