2009-09-29T04:25:34
Dave Pawson.
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html5
As per my last blog entry, I've been playing with (x)html 5. This arose simply because I'd found a schema and setup for nxml-mode. So I played. I skimmed the WD for new elements and tried them. I'm currently using Firefox 3.5.3. I wrote the files out to disk (.xml extension) and opened them directly in Firefox. Great. I saw some mathml and SVG just as I'd hoped. Perhaps all this hype about html 5 being a can of worms wasn't right after all. Then I wrote up my experiences and posted them to the blog. That's when the problems started. I've not seen this before. I uploaded my test file as html5.xml. Linked to it from my blog page. No change to .htaccess. I set the meta/@http-equiv content as ... to be honest I tried many combinations. What I saw using firefox was a file downloaded to my tmp directory, then opened from there. What ... I didn't understand it. Slowly I started to list the combinations that a user seems to need to get right.
That's my current list, which is more than enough for me. My objective was to write a file that is 'usable' with Firefox (I'm on Linux so don't really care about IE since I can't test it). I'm highly unlikely to stretch the limits of the html 5 vocabulary since I only ever write simple pages. However I do like the idea of including mathml and SVG. I'm told SVGWeb is helpful here, but being old fashioned, I'd prefer a simple file, compliant to W3C 'standards' (recs and WDs). I currently don't care about adding RDFa content, or RDF for that matter. Nor am I interested in SVG animation.
So what combination of the above list works? According to my very simple exploration it seems to be:
How much of that is 'right' according to the html5 WG... I've no idea, but it does what I wanted. I guess I'm trying to mix what the W3C want to specify (via committee) and what the Mozilla crew decide. Which will probably take quite a while to filter out the accommodations and settle on something workable.
I'm beginning to see what burningbird has been on about for the last couple of months. One sample from her pages
Herein we discover the paradox that is HTML5: XML allowed in HTML, but parsed as HTML; extensible namespaced elements that are valid in SVG/XML, becoming invalid when embedded in the non-extensible environment that is HTML5. HTML5 as XHTML likes namespaces. HTML5 as HTML does not like namespaces. But HTML5, as both XHTML and HTML likes SVG, and SVG likes namespaces.
It makes me wonder just how bad the atmosphere must be within the WG for this sort of mess to be posted as a WD. More when I find out more.
Keywords: html5
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