Re: The future of XML related technologies in Mozilla

Ian Hickson wrote:
> In DOM5 HTML, every Document supports HTMLDocument.

"Good luck".  ;)

As in, I don't see that shipping in Gecko in the next 2 years... (not 
going to happen in 1.9, almost certainly, and the next version is 
probably 2 years away at least).

>> In addition to which, for serialization purposes this is all patently 
>> insufficient without jumping through a _lot_ of hoops (one of the hoops 
>> being that innerHTML doesn't serialize the node in question, so the only 
>> way to do the equivalent of outerHTML is to import the subtree into a 
>> brand-new HTMLDocument, etc).  Especially if, God forbid, you were to 
>> want to serialize SVG or MathML or some such.
> 
> Could you elaborate on this? I don't follow.

You can't use innerHTML on non-HTML nodes.  Assuming that you wanted the 
part about SVG/MathML elaborated.  Or did you want something else?

>> I also fully expect people to demand configurable serialization at some 
>> point.
> 
> The answer "no" is probably good enough for now, though. Eventually, we 
> can add configuration attributes for the really desired options

My point is that there's no good way to add such with the innerHTML 
solution.  So it makes sense to have an easy-to-instantiate serializer 
that such things could be added to later.

> but frankly I don't see the point -- once an author has an XML string, he can 
> fix it to whatever he wants himself, e.g. on the server side.

You mean reparse it and reserialize it?  That's what it would come down 
to...  Plus, why force a round trip to the server?  That's generally a 
bad idea, imo.

> HTML5 has this all documented now. Let me know if you spot any errors. I 
> know of a few that have been reported to the WHATWG list, and that I'll be 
> fixing in due course, but please report any you see.

Given the size of the HTML5 spec and my time constraints, I personally 
am not likely to get a chance to read the whole thing before I finish my 
PhD work (so spring 2008).  If you want me to read particular small 
self-contained parts, please link to them and I'll see what I can do.

Unless that was supposed to be the collective "you"?

-Boris