RE: [xml-dev] Slightly off, but... was: XUL appears to be dead, istheresome other standard that should be looked at

["Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer" <schnitz@mozquito.com>]

> Yes, because HTML is not XML.
> Seriously now, we're in 2002 and one would expect native XHTML support
> layered on top of XML support. Instead, current XHTML support is
largely
> based on "legacy" HTML support software. That's why it's tough to move
> along and work with XHTML modularization etc. Most browsers don't even
> fully implement namespaces... And namespaces are the means to
> distinguish vocabularies these days (RDF people will jump out now:).

Yes I agree, although I have to soften your argument a little.
If you are still authoring towards IE4+/Netscape4+, then you can't
expect namespaces to work, of course. To make XForms, XHTML
and Namespaces work on those browsers specifically, the idea is
to make that happen with a Flash MX implementation so it works
if Flash 6 is installed.
 
On the other hand, if we look at the most recent browsers, like IE6,
I'm always amazed how much does work now already. You can
use Modularization and Namespaces, and mix and match XML,
use CSS to style it and get a meaningful result. Its just that most
people aren't aware what IE6 and Mozilla 1.x can already do
today. And yes, without some back-door like Flash, you cannot
seriously author for just those newest browsers just yet.
 
I actually went and did it. I took IE6 and threw everything new
from the W3C against it, just for me to learn what IE6 can do.
What came out was my own RSS Blog [1]. My blog is just the RSS 
XML file itself with a CSS stylesheet. So now people constantly ask 
me "Where is the RSS feed?", and I go, "This *is* the RSS feed", they 
say "No can't be, it doesn't show me the XML tree..." ... "But you 
can style XML directly with CSS" ... "Really?!" (the world simply
doesn't know this works at all in *any* browser, is my impression).
 
And the other thing: My blog has real hyperlinks. Since the
RSS XML file defines links with the <link> element, which
of course browsers won't understand as links, I've simply 
used HTML linking inside my RSS file thru namespaces and
it just works:
 
<item>
  <title>...</title>
  <description>...</description>
  <link>http://...</link>
  <html:a href="http://...";>...</html:a>
  <dc:date>2002-07-09T10:19:17-01:00</dc:date>
</item>

So you can throw any arbitrary XML at IE6, style it
with CSS *and* import anything you like from XHTML
thru namespaces. That's exactly the Modularization idea 
implemented right there. Mozilla is just not there yet but very close.
I do think we are getting there...
 
- Sebastian
 
[1] http://webaccess.mozquito.com/features/index.xml