Bug 12583 – reconsider giving HTML elements in non-XML HTML documents an XHTML namespaceURI

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: WONTFIX
• Component: DOM

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Calling namespaceURI() on an element in an HTML document now gives "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" namespace.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Created attachment 12917 [details]
test case

[Maciej Stachowiak]

<rdar://problem/4975136>

[Dave Hyatt]

Is that wrong?  I actually did that on purpose I think.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Hmm, now I checked HTML5, and it indeed says that HTML elements must be in XHTML namespace. Yet, this is not what I get from Firefox 2.

Also, this appears to clash with XPath spec (which is very explicit about null namespaces, see <http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#node-tests>), as queries like "//div" would no longer work in HTML.

I guess our XPath implementation could be tweaked to account for this issue instead, but this would mean a rather unpleasant mismatch in behavior of different parts of DOM.

[Maciej Stachowiak]

Classically, HTML has had a null namespace. We moved it to the XHTML namespace because HTML5 suggests this, and it gives a better match between HTML and XHTML behavior. We could reconsider this change, but since it is an intentional behavior change, I don't think we should track it as a regression or a P1 until we decide what to do.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

> Also, this appears to clash with XPath spec

FWIW, our XPath implementation now has a special case to hide this issue.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

No longer willing to reconsider.