WHATWG IRC discussion about GRDDL and head/@profile (ISSUE-55)

Hi,

there was some discussion over at the WHATWG IRC channel about this 
issue around:

   <http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20080725#l-553>

It's good that discussion takes place, but if it doesn't happen here, 
chances are people miss it and thus won't be able to comment on it.

In this particular case it seems that a big part of the discussion was 
about the profile attribute identifying a resource that would then be 
used to obtain the GRDDL XSLT:

# # [20:35] <tommorris> then it checks to have a look at the @profile 
attribute, loads each of the URIs listed in the profile attribute and 
extracts from those URIs the location of an XSLT document
# # [20:36] <tommorris> It then runs all the XSLTs found across the 
document, takes all the outputs and loads them in to an RDF graph and 
returns a Graph object to the user to do with as they like
# # [20:36] <Hixie> ok so there are two problems with that
# # [20:36] <Hixie> one is that your output is RDF, so in practice it 
really doesn't matter what you do :-)
# # [20:36] <Hixie> the other is that the target of the profile="" 
attribute typically doesn't include a link to an XSLT sheet
# # [20:37] <Hixie> and it's unlikely that most authors of microformats 
will include the link to a page that mentions XSLT

Looking at <http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/#grddl-xhtml> this seems to be 
incorrect:

> An example Dublin Core META transformation
> 
> For example, this document follows the conventions of [RFC2731], and it explicitly uses the GRDDL profile and links to an XSLT transformation to RDF/XML to signal that the transformation is a faithful rendition:
> 
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
>   <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view">
>     <title>Some Document</title>
> 
>     <link rel="transformation"
>        href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/dc-extract/dc-extract.xsl" />
>     <meta name="DC.Subject"
>        content="ADAM; Simple Search; Index+; prototype" />
>     ...
>   </head>
>   ...
> </html>

So the profile attribute merely acts as a signal that the recipient 
should interpret link/@rel=transformation as pointing to the GRDDL 
transformation.  Unless I'm missing something.

So, yes, head/@profile has lots of issues (it allows opting in, but not 
disambiguating), but removing it from the language does break existing 
content. Therefore, it should be added back in, or we should have a 
discussion that results in something *better* becoming available 
(distributed extensibility comes to mind).

BR, Julian

Received on Saturday, 26 July 2008 11:31:25 UTC