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Extensibility and Markup, Again and Again

Shelley on Thursday, 2008-10-23
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Proving that the issues with extensibility will never go away until faced, and resolved:

  • Anne van Kesteren: Concerns that HTML5 does not have distributed extensibility. That is, namespaces. What people seem to want is to extend the browser with hundreds of markup languages. (How this keeps things simple to answer was not something I saw addressed.) You need something else than namespaces for that though, to start with. Also, what is wrong with using XML for this?
  • Sam Ruby: It seems that the distributed extensibility discussion won’t go away like apparently some would hope it would [...] It occurs to me that Anne may be intentionally being thick here. what is wrong with using XML for this? Come on. I can answer that with two words: IE, and Postel. Next question?
  • Dave Orchard: While I agree with Sam's assertion that misdirection is going on and IE8 is crucial, I think the real issue is that the anti-distributed extensibility crowd want control over all the languages that could be added into HTML. There's no changing XML that would make them happy. I think the goal is that the HTML WG becomes the gatekeeper over any new languages that get added into the browser. We've seen it with aria-, SVG, MathML. Note that IE8 has a form of namespaces, and Chris Wilson was a supporter of distributed extensibility on the HTML WG list.

I'm not sure we need another form of namespaces. What we need is to address the concept of extensibility, without looking at the mechanics. Is extensibility good? Years ago, I would have been puzzled at even asking this question. Of course extensibility is good. Now I'm not sure that this opinion is shared by one and all. So, perhaps we should ask, Is extensibility bad? From the answers, we might find out where the problems exist, and maybe generate a dialog that results in solutions.

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Submitted by Sam Ruby (not verified) on Fri, 10/24/2008 - 10:27.

My point of view is a slight variation of that last question.

Whether extensibility is good or bad is beside the point. Extensibility will happen. The relevant question is whether we want to plan for it, enable it, and perhaps direct it to the extent that we can?

Or do we want to pretend like it doesn't happen, just like WHATWG pretends like RDFa doesn't exist, and thereby make HTML5 simply one source of input as to what is really practiced on the web?

More concretely, does it make sense that Henri's excellent validator will accept the OPMLish data- attributes because they are in one editors draft, but not the RDFa attributes that are a W3C Recommendation?


Submitted by Ian Hickson (not verified) on Fri, 10/24/2008 - 16:24.

I sure hope HTML5 is never the only source of input as to what happens on the Web...


Submitted by Bud on Wed, 10/29/2008 - 11:22.

I guess my vote is for extensibility being too complicated as it now stands and therefore a detriment. If we limited namespace declarations to the root element and amended DOM Level 1 getElementsByTagName to handle prefix:tagName sanely by definition, then I'd be for.