Re: CfC: Request transition of HTML Microdata to Candidate Recommendation

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net> wrote:

> In accordance with both the W3C process's requirement to record the
> group's decision to request advancement[1], and with the steps identified
> in the "Plan 2014" CfC[2], this is a Call for Consensus (CfC) to request
> transition to CR for the following document:
>
> http://htmlwg.org/cr/**microdata/Overview.html<http://htmlwg.org/cr/microdata/Overview.html>
>
> Silence will be taken to mean there is no objection, but positive
> responses are encouraged. If there are no objections by Monday,
> November 26th, this resolution will carry.
>


(personal email as a invited expert and generally a Web developer)

TL;DR: I support this CFC.

As for some more thoughts that have led me to that decision:

I understand some of the objections of Manu and the RDFa community.
However, I believe we will see both Microdata and RDFa/RDFa Lite in the
market in parallel for a while until such a time that the tools for one of
them make it a clear winner and will therefore attract Web devs more than
the other. Before such a time, nobody is in a position to state which one
is the "better" technology.

As for pursuing both Microdata and RDFa  at the W3C: I have no issues with
there being two competing specs developed at the W3C as long as there are
people developing both specs. There may be a case to say that Microdata is
mainly developed by the WHATWG and there is nobody actively pursuing it in
the W3C HTML WG and therefore we should just leave all development to the
WHATWG. Having seen only about 4 people reply to this CFC is making me
wonder whether there are indeed a sufficient number of people interested
here to continue development into the future. But this is not the question
to be answered now.

As for the CR (and later REC) publication of Microdata: Since we have
pulled in the changes that the WHATWG made, the CR - and later the REC -
will provide a good snap-shot of where the Microdata spec was at at that
point in time. Since the Microdata spec has reached a good level of
maturity, that is a good document to publish and to be able to reference.

Best Regards,
Silvia.