[Bug 12854] I am quite surprised to see that things such as the list of allowed values for the "rel" attribute of the "link" tag (aka. the list of link types) as well as the list of allowed values for the "name" attribute of the "meta" tag are supposed to be listed o

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12854

--- Comment #4 from Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> 2011-06-05 18:14:07 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> This is no problem for a human, indeed, but the standard specifically indicates
> that compliance checkers must abide by the wiki page, and they cannot show
> common sense to estimate if the current state of the wiki page is sane.

Well, in particular, the validator maintainers could always revert the changes
themselves.  Or decide not to update their copy of the list at this moment. 
The standard specifically indicates that validators can cache the page contents
-- they don't have to use the very latest version.  Henri is the only one I
know of who runs an HTML5 validator, and he only updates the allowed value list
manually.

> This is not allowed by the current wording of the standard, which states that
> "Anyone is free to edit the Microformats wiki existing-rel-values page at any
> time to add a type." The standard even states that "conformance checkers should
> offer to add [unknown values] to the Wiki" (supposedly to make the document
> valid).

That wording is not incompatible with some type of moderation.  It doesn't say
the edits have to be visible immediately.  In practice they currently are and
it's not an issue, but if you're worried about futureproofing, the wording
could doubtless be loosened a bit.

> I think you can get the best of both worlds by indicating the Wiki as a
> recommended discussion page in the standard, but not as part of the norm. I
> fail to see how the currently proposed approach is better: it imposes a burden
> on compliance checkers, and amounts to the same as accepting mostly anything
> (if compliance checkers really allow users to add any value they like to the
> wiki to make their documents valid, do you really expect the wiki to be useful
> to standardize attribute values?).

Anyone can add an entry, but other people can remove it too if they think it's
illegitimate.  That's how wikis work.  Personally I do expect a wiki will be
useful to standardize attribute values, but we won't know until we try.  This
wording has been in the standard for a while now and there have been no notable
problems, so it's fair to say that the burden of proof should be on the ones
arguing for its removal, not the ones arguing to keep it.

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Received on Sunday, 5 June 2011 18:14:14 UTC