Re: The harm that can come if the W3C supports publication of competing specs

On Jan 17, 2010, at 4:59 , Shelley Powers wrote:
> 
> Leading me to ask: David, is Apple officially committed to supporting
> Microdata over RDFa?

We don't make statements of official support, other than what we ship in our products, I'm afraid.

> What's also bothersome in this email exchange is that there's no
> indication in this discussion that the web is not run by Google,
> Mozilla, Apple, and Opera alone.

I think you are forgetting that the web is 'run' by people and companies adopting technologies and solutions that meet their needs, or their users' needs.  Telling people that they 'ought' to add metadata, 'ought' to use the W3C specification for adding metadata, and so on, is basically like pushing on a piece of string.  They'll adopt it if we did a good job of providing a specification around which they can meet their needs in an interoperable fashion.

> Seemingly forgetting that when comes
> to metadata--heck, when it comes to anything on the web--there's a
> host of other tools and organizations, and people, that also have a
> stake in the result.

Everyone is free to adopt and deploy, and hence exert influence.

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Monday, 18 January 2010 00:20:48 UTC