Re: The implied @about="": Explanation and some problems

Mark, Richard,

Interesting discussion, thanks Mark for writing it up.

I see Richard's point about how some designers' use of BASE makes adding
RDFa more difficult... but I'm not sure we can do much about it, since
BASE does define how to resolve all URLs on a page, and it would be odd
to have one set of rules for @about, but a different one for @href, and
we obviously can't modify how @href behaves.

I seem to remember that one of our *goals* in setting @about="" on HEAD
and not on HTML was, in fact, to enable the use of @typeof on HEAD to
give the current URL a type without having to explicitly say about="".
If you want a bnode, there are plenty of better places in the markup to
make that happen.

I'm not sure I see a strong enough reason for a change in the spec. I
sympathize with Richard's example, but I think most of the complexity
there is unavoidable given how BASE and @href already behave. I also
sympathize with Mark's examples... except for @typeof on HEAD which I
think we actually built that way for a reason :)

-Ben