Re: ISSUE-76: Need feedback on splitting Microdata into separate specification

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Incidentally, I feedback from the Working Group is welcome and encouraged
>>> on
>>> the topic of whether Microdata should be split out of the main spec, even
>>> in
>>> advane of the Change Proposal. Right now it's not clear to me who in the
>>> Working Group is in favor of or against this change, and why.
>>
>> I would prefer to keep microdata in the HTML5 spec. I think
>> microformats are a very interesting feature and important enough to
>> keep in the main specification.
>> ...
>
> I agree that they address an interesting problem (same as RDFa), but why
> does it mean they need to be part of HTML5? After all, XHR is also an
> interesting feature, and isn't part of HTML5.

Because IMHO they are an integral part of the HTML language. XHR for
example is almost entirely language independent. There's certainly
features that I'd like to see broken out of HTML5, such as the Window
object, but given that microdata introduces new markup, I think
breaking that out would be much more awkward. Another couple of
examples is that I think the canvas 2d context could be put in its own
spec (but I think I prefer the canvas element itself in HTML5), but
I've always argued that the new form types should be part of the core
language.

Similarly, I would argue that while the features that XHR provide is
much more orthgonal to the feature set of HTML, whereas the same isn't
in my opinion true for microdata. Microdata has a lot of overlap with
the distributed extensibility feature that many have argued that HTML5
should have.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 14 October 2009 17:26:19 UTC