Re: Design Principles Document update

Maciej Stachowiak schreef:
> The "Visible Metadata" principle is favored by Microformats advocates 
> (among others), but objected to by RDF / Semantic Web advocates.

I don’t see how you can make such a distinction. RDFa is exactly about 
using visible metadata. I think that microformats are a subset of the 
Semantic Web (although less formal than RDF), and not competing with it.

I think the rule as mentioned in the document is quite ok, it conveys a 
preference for making metadata visible, for very sensible reasons. There 
are also some cases however where you want to explicitly not have the 
machine-readable data visible. For example e.g. dates formatted 
year-month-day, or Google’s rel=nofollow attribute. As long as it 
doesn’t say that metadata MUST be visible, I am fine with it. Maybe the 
text should make that more explicit, so that people don’t misinterpret 
it as a strict rule, and debunk any proposals for metadata when it’s not 
visible.

By the way, the <title> element’s contents is something that gets 
outdated very easily. Even if it’s visible it doesn’t guarantee it will 
be updated when it’s redundant and less prominent.

> The "Mostly Semantic Markup" principle is favored by HTML advocates, 
> but objected to by those who think you need XML/SGML to have "real" 
> semantics.

XML is a language without any semantics at all, so that doesn’t really 
make sense to me.


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.