xml-dev - Re: XHTML 1.0 returned to HTML WG

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Don Park" <donpark@docuverse.com> writes:

(that Paul Prescod writes that)

> ><html:table><html:title/></html:table>
> >
> >And thanks to the one line spec, this is now legal. What the 

Actually, it's neither legal nor illegal, simply unspecified.

(and Don writes)

> There is an arguable common sense when we refer to a document as
> 'HTMLish' and I believe your example violates that.  If people are
> going to abuse namespace like that, it is our job to knock some
> sense into them rather than wrap them up in diapers and ducktape
> everything with foams.  IMHO, I must say.

Just so -- in the end, it's simple peer pressure that forces
interoperability.  That's a terrifying thought for standards writers,
but it's also the explanation for why scarcely any of the 18 W3C
Recommendations at 

  http://www.w3.org/TR/

have actually been widely implemented so far (CSS1, XML, and maybe DOM
-- anything else?).  We won't even start counting the WDs...

It's nice, then, that there's a lot of pressure for implementors to
conform to the XML REC, but things don't always work that way: after a
few years' observation, we can safely say that there is little peer
pressure for industry to pay much attention to the W3C's HTML specs,
since there's only a miniscule amount of conformant HTML 3.* or 4.*
out there.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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