Proposals/dropxmlattributes

Proposals

1. Drop the xmlspace, xmllang and xmlbase attributes on the SVGElement DOM interface.
2. Drop xml:base completely from svg and define how <html:base> works with svg instead. One way to define this could be to say that urls inside the svg takes the base URL from the environment settings object.
   

   Note that this is not a proposal to add <svg:base>, nor a proposal to add a non-prefixed 'base' attribute to svg.

   Also note that this may potentially break existing content, so we may want to investigate this further.

3. Drop xml:lang in favor of lang
4. Define xml:space in terms of 'white-space' in the spec, removing the old wording completely

Rationale

UseCounter for xmlbase in Blink: https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/580

From that data it looks safe to drop at least xmlbase from the SVGElement DOM interface.

From the looks of it gecko has already dropped the xmlbase, xmllang and xmlspace attributes from the SVGElement interface, https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/dom/webidl/SVGElement.webidl.

Related bugreports

• Remove xml:base support: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=341854 (Blink)
• Remove support for xml:base: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=903372 (Gecko)
• WebAppsWG: Define base URLs in DOM - https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=20976