RE: [xml-dev] "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basicprinciples

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Wed, 2012-07-04 at 13:30 +0000, Rushforth, Peter wrote:

> So, I guess those parsers could also resolve xml:href and xml:src references,
> and leave the interpretation of the link typing to be worked out
> by the application.

What would be the use of that? The parser _needs_ to resolve (and
follow) URIs in system identifiers, so it _needs_ xml:base.

The majority of XML systems are not connected to a user interface.

[Peter quoting David Carlisle:]
> > Given that a large part of xml _on the web_ is xhtml and that 
> > uses href rather than xml:href,
> 
> I gather you don't often see application/xhtml+xml in the wild?

Not often, because of Internet Explorer prompting users to save the file
instead of displaying the resource, and because that MIME content type
header invokes draconian error behaviour in browsers, whose authors
decided not to attempt recovery.


> > I still don't think you've 
> > provided any use case where an application that understood 
> > this new xml:href proposal couldn't just as simply understand 
> > an href attribute.
> 
> Of course it could, but libraries can be re-used, so if the affordances
> are built into one namespace (xml:), then a library can be written
> to provide services to applications across many use cases.

The libraries have already been written, though, using HTML. Thousands
of them.

You're right that if we were starting again with XML we might consider
xml:href (although it would certainly meet with strong opposition
because of the software layering violation).

The goal of the XML work was to put SGML on the Web alongside HTML. It
was not to replace HTML. If it had been an attempt to replace HTML, as
Jeni Tennison pointed out in Prague this year, XML would have looked
very different.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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