Anne van Kesteren schreef:
>>> They tried this more or less with SVG. It seems that nobody really 
>>> understood
>>> the concept of namespaces. Lots of ocntent out there uses 
>>> xlink:href="" where
>>> xlink is bound to no namespace. The leading product simply assumes 
>>> that it is
>>> bound to http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink  ignoring the fact that the 
>>> document is
>>> non namespace-well-formed.
>>
>> Oh, what a nonsense! SVG documents are seldom hand-authored, so 
>> no-one ever deals with xlink.
>
> The people who wrote the SVG authoring tools had to deal with XLink. 
> The people
> who do handwrite SVG have to deal with it. And both mostly fail. I'm 
> not sure
> what your point regarding "nonsense" is as I'm simply telling what Opera
> encountered and I believe Mozilla encountered as well.
>
> That there is one implementation based on the fact that the DTD presets
> xmlns:xlink and xmlns, well... The documents do validate, for example...

Well, yes, they should never have done that. But thatâ??s another issue.

>> No, the cause of the abuse of the xlink prefix is *exactly* that the 
>> leading product doesnâ??t have a proper XML parser (fyi: it accepts 
>> more things that are invalid XML, such as <circle> without closing 
>> /), and that because of that authoring tools can (and do) get away 
>> with generating invalid XML. The whole point of XML having strict 
>> error handling is to avoid problems like this.
>
> So what again was nonsense? I believe I pointed this out...

My impression was that you were talking about hand-authoring of XLink. 
Hand-authoring would often be the case for XHTML, and I agree that 
generally people know too little about namespaces to properly apply them.

However, I think the comparison with Adobeâ??s SVG implementation is off, 
the situation is quite different. Itâ??s is not an authoring problem. At 
least from UA implementors I would expect them to understand such basic 
XML concepts, and I really canâ??t understand how the Adobe SVG readerâ??s 
current situation could ever arise. The fact that authoring tools (or 
the occasional hand-author) generate non-well-formed XML is not caused 
by namespaces, but by the broken parser implementation of such a mayor 
player and by the specification having the SVG and XLink namespaces be 
implied in the DTD.

Anyways, as I said above, for the case of XHTML I absolutely agree with 
you that having to use different namespaces in common markup is not a 
good idea.


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.