Re: Data blocks, not marked up content

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:

>
> On 7 Oct 2011, at 10:25, Lin Clark wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 8:26 AM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
> >> The microdata spec also allows, afaik, the <link> and <meta> elements in
> the body if used with microdata attributes. Which is a good approach. I
> would like to see that possibility extended to RDFa, too. The simplest
> approach would be to allow <link> and <meta> in the body in general. The
> RDFa processing model would handle those out of the box.
> >>
> >> Maybe this is a recommendation this group could make to HTML5
> >
> > I strongly agree on this. It would be poor usability otherwise, because
> there is no clear reason why one syntax should be different than the other
> in this regard, from a content author's perspective.
>
> There is already a bug on this:
>
>  http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14114
>
> and I agree that there should be consistency between RDFa and microdata
> here.
>
> On the other hand, I don't know whether using <link> and <meta> in content
> is actually a good recommendation for users right now. Most browsers will
> move these elements up into the <head> of the document, which means that
> client-side RDFa/microdata parsers won't generate correct data for these
> documents. (This might be a problem for server-side parsers as well, I
> guess; I don't know whether off-the-shelf HTML5 parsers have the same
> problem.)
>

Another limitation of <link> and <meta> is that they cannot be nested. So
while they are handy for adding properties to an existing item in content
flow, they are not the best approach for more stand alone snippets like the
ones Gavin posted, where nesting is preferable and more human friendly. To
avoid nesting and keep a flat set of HTML elements in <head>, you could use
@about (à la N Triples) or @itemref which would lead to
more complicated markup.

Steph.


>
> Is this something someone would volunteer to investigate so we have some
> solid basis for a recommendation here?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jeni
> --
> Jeni Tennison
> http://www.jenitennison.com
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 7 October 2011 14:33:12 UTC