Re: HTML4's profile="" attribute's absence in HTML5

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 4:14 AM, Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com> wrote:
>  Karl Dubost wrote:
>  > Le 7 mai 2008 à 09:35, Ian Hickson a écrit :
>  >> Summary: profile="" doesn't work in practice so we have dropped it.
>
>  > wrong.
>  > http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/prrequest
>
>  As nearly as I could tell from their documents, they assume XHTML
>  rather than HTML.  If you really need valid XML, then a I suppose it
>  doesn't matter what HTML says; a different or even custom namespace
>  would work.  (And profile didn't even seem to be their recommended
>  method, though I'm not as sure on that.)
>

Profile is the recommended method for XHTML, and by extension HTML.
For other XML dialects, GRDDL uses a namespaced attribute attached to
the root element. Many GRDDL parsers run HTML 4 through Tidy or a
similar library.

>  Is profile used consistently enough across documents that it is worth
>  specifying any particular behavior?
>

It has a particular behaviour already - GRDDL-based user agents can
parse data from documents containing GRDDL profiles. I have put
together a list of these:
http://getsemantic.com/wiki/Profile_Attribute_Examples_in_the_Wild

As has been said before, there is no reason not to keep the profile
attribute in HTML 5. It doesn't break anything, and makes adding
RDF-based metadata very simple.

link/@rel='grddl-profile' is not a good solution since it breaks
existing user agents which are expecting head/@profile

-- 
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2008 13:35:22 UTC