Namespaces in HTML: Too much trouble to bother with

re: Namespaces in HTML: Too much trouble to bother with

jeffcogs — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 23:15:08 GMT

Hi Danny, I've run into similar messes trying to mix XML and HTML. With Firefox, what worked for me was if I renamed my .html file as .xhtml. I just tried that with your sample file; I renamed nstest.html to nstest.xhtml, and opened it in firefox locally (file:///c:/temp/nstest.xhtml) and it worked as it should, without messing around with content types. In fact, I just tried it in IE and it works there too, while the .html version doesn't. Of course, technically speaking you're no longer in HTML now, however, and that can cause problems.

Also, a problem I have with namespaces is that people are free to use whatever namespace identifiers they want (like your mention of devlive being arbitrary), and that can make for messy code, especially if two people on a project end up with two different IDs for the same namespace. I know it's important so you don't have clashes, but it's not a perfect solution in my mind.

Jeff

re: Namespaces in HTML: Too much trouble to bother with

dthorpe — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 03:08:54 GMT

Hi Jeff,

Be careful testing web page behaviors using local files. A lot of the browser security model is different for local files than it is for files obtained from a bona fide http server - even if the http server is just little ol' localhost.

In my testing, requesting a .xhtml file from localhost or from my off-site web server returned the file with a content-type header of "text/plain". This failed to behave as XML, XHTML, or HTML. Firefox and IE both asked where to save the downloaded file on the local system before opening it. Once it was saved locally and loaded from file://c:/temp/blah/, it came up ok in Firefox, but that's a bit too much firewalking for a web page.

It wasn't until I configured the web server to send .xhtml with a particular content-type header that Firefox started responding to the NS functions. For Apache, you can configure the file extension/content-type association in the .htaccess file, as detailed in the "Schillmania" page mentioned in this article. For IIS, I don't know.

Thanks for the feedback!

-Danny

HTML Namespace Attributes and IE document.namespaces

Windows Live Quantum Mechanics — Sun, 27 May 2007 21:27:27 GMT

A few posts ago I promised to elaborate on a little gotcha that bit us in the butt while prepping the