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

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:08:04 +0200, Shelley Powers  
<shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 6:57 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>  
> wrote:
>> I haven't seen a need for @namespace at all really, besides user agent  
>> style sheets and perhaps the somewhat normative style sheets in the  
>> HTML5
>> specification. As far as I'm concerned CSS would have been much better  
>> off without support for namespaces. (I fixed the specification mostly  
>> because it is a somewhat legacy thing for which it seemed easier to get
>> interoperability than remove support for it entirely everywhere. In
>> retrospect this may have been a bad choice, but you have to pick your
>> battles.)
>
> I have, when I cut and paste an SVG file into one of my sites. Most
> have Creative Commons licenses recorded using namespaces. Some have
> other metadata. All are given using namespaces.

And all are always hidden the way SVG is defined, so not relevant to CSS.  
And even if, the context would probably be enough in most cases.


> And I'm sure I'll have other uses in the future, too. I'm no so
> sanguine about the ability of this group to read the needs of the
> future, to feel comfortable that we can meet all of these needs when
> the HTML5 spec is released. Decentralized extensibility is less for
> current needs, and more for the unknown future.

Designing for the unknown future sounds like a waste of time and effort to  
me. I forward compatibility is important, but adding a ton of complexity  
for a need that may emerge in the future seems unsound.


> But regardless of future needs, I need it now. Anyone using SVG inline
> in HTML will need it now.

There's not a lot of overlap in element names and there's always an  
ancestor you can bounce of on so I do not think this is true.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Monday, 19 October 2009 12:19:17 UTC