Re: XHTML 2 Working Group won't be renewed?

One of TBL's suggestions that I thought was excellent was that the
text/html mime would define a bunch of namespaces such as xmlns:svg,
:mathml, :aria, saving the author the ns decl steps.  That didn't even
get close to traction when we (myself and Henry representing the TAG)
pitched it to henri and anne because the author could still define
their own.   Remember, aria uses aria- to prefix their names so they
have the same # of characters and are forced to use a "-" separator
rather than a ":".   That's what convinced me it wasn't about
authoring, it was about control.

Also, to a certain extent, it's about whether you think the space of
names is growing substantially or not.  Roughly the "looking
backwards" vs "looking forwards" camps.  I'm in the camp that the
space of names can and would grow substantially if html5 supported it,
and the other camp points to how few namespaces have really emerged as
needing support in the browser.  Of course I then respond that the
only reason they could get support in the browser was because html did
allow new names and html5 defines an unknown name as an error!  And so
it goes.

Cheers,
Dave

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Michael Kay<mike@saxonica.com> wrote:

>  > There's supposed to be an extensibility workshop in September at one of
> the F2Fs where namespaces in general will be hashed out - I plan to be
> monitoring that one carefully, as I suspect that there will be a move to
> "fix" namespaces in a way that will have long term negative repercussions
> for the XML community.
>
> Let's approach this positively. XML namespaces are a pretty awful piece of
> design. Perhaps this is an opportunity to revisit the requirement and do
> something a bit more elegant.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
> http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
>
>
>
>