Re: ISSUE-41/ACTION-97 decentralized-extensibility

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 6:07 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Oct 2, 2009, at 5:33 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
>
> I can also name representatives of browser implementors other than
>> Microsoft which have expressed support for a mechanism similar to XML
>> namespaces in text/html.
>>
>> For now, I will simply name one: Brendan Eich.
>>
>>
>> http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/03/the_open_web_and_its_adversari.html
>>
>> "Consider just the open standards that make up the major web content
>> languages: HTML, CSS, DOM, JS ... the Web is alive precisely because of the
>> distributed extensibility of its content languages".  Shortly after I wrote
>> it, I specifically discussed with Brendan my previous proposal[1] which
>> shares a number of similarities with MS's current proposal, and he indicated
>> (to be fair: at the time) that he was in support of the general approach,
>> though clearly there were a lot of details to work out.
>>
>> I've added him to the copy list to see if he wishes to comment further.
>>
>
Given that Brendan says that "The web *is* alive preciesly because of the
distributed extensibility", at a time when HTML did not have anything
similar  XML Namespaces support, I would not share Sams interpretation.
Especially when he's mentioning Greasemonkey in the same context, which is a
wholly different type of extensibility.


>  If Mozilla expresses interest in implementing some form of namespaces in
> HTML, then that would certainly change the picture. For now, I put more
> weight on recent clear statements from Jonas and Henri, than an ambiguous
> remark in a 2.5-year-old blog post from Brendan (to be fair, none of the
> three of them claimed to be speaking officially for Mozilla). In context, it
> does not look to me like Brendan was using "distributed extensibility" as a
> code word for "XML-like namespaces". But Brendan can speak for himself.
>

There is no such thing as someone speaking officially for Mozilla on this
type of matters. (I made that mistake once and quickly turned out there was
people of dissenting opinions). We work as a community and anyone that's
part of that community is allowed to have an different opinion.

What I can say is that I know of several people that think that XML
Namespaces are needlessly complex, and none that like them. However that's
not to say that that is the opinion of everyone in the mozilla community.

/ Jonas

Received on Saturday, 3 October 2009 06:34:29 UTC