Dear members of the RDF-A group,

My name is Jose Cantera, I'm with Telefonica and  I represent Telefonica in some W3C groups. I'm writing this e-mail to express our strong disagreement with respect to the usage of the class attribute in RDF/A. The class attribute has presentational connotations but not semantic connotations. You are mixing things in a very dangerous and confusing manner.

We think it's a big mistake you are making. New attributes are needed for expressing the semantics and not reusing existing ones that initially were intended to other purposes. Semantic-annotation attributes should be different than other attributes and should easily be distinguished from the other.

Regarding the role attribute the same comment applies. Role attribute has connotations related to accessibility but not to semantics. New attributes for semantics are needed, although we know that you are, as usual, adopting the ideas of browser vendors who are not willing to create or consider new attributes in HTML-like languages.

This issue, for us is a big issue, and somehow would "limit and stop" our adoption of RDF-A in our research work.

Kind regards

Ben Adida escribió:
Hi all,

Though we have discussed the CLASS and ROLE issue, we haven't quite
resolved the last consensus we came to. So, I want to phrase the
consensus as best as I understand it. We will vote to resolve this (or a
modified version if need be) at next week's telecon on 4/23, so please
send all comments ASAP.

Proposed Resolution:

In all RDFa-compliant HTML documents (e.g. XHTML1.1+RDFa), the CLASS
attribute is of type CURIEs, a space-separated list of values. Each
qualified CURIE value yields an rdf:type assertion on the subject
corresponding to the attribute's element, exactly as if the element had
a child LINK element. Unqualified CURIEs are ignored, e.g. class="foo".

e.g.

<div id="foo" class="big foaf:Person">
...
</div>

yields

<#foo> rdf:type foaf:Person .


Where the ROLE attribute is defined, e.g. XHTML2, its value is also
CURIEs, thought this time it yields an xh2:role assertion (with xh2 the
XHTML2 namespace). The subject resolution is identical to that of the
CLASS attribute. As there is no "backwards compatibility" issue with
this attribute, all values yield triples

e.g.

<div role="wai:Menu nav">
...
</div>

yields

_:div0 xh2:role wai:Menu .
_:div0 xh2:role :nav .


-Ben