Re: Why bound prefixes are an anti-pattern in language design

Ian,

I'll admit that you're onto something when seeking a hands-down  
simpler solution for extensible metadata in HTML5. I wish everyone  
involved in this could let the arms down for a little bit and try to  
come up with a better solution. Of course, the dream is that such  
solution wouldn't totally disregard existing deployments because it  
can re-use existing test cases and user behavior. It should also take  
into account the 'hard evidence' you have accumulated through yours  
(and others' experiments) on what works and what doesn't. However, I  
think that making something up new (definitely based on some of your  
hard evidence, yet not really tested at least as much as RDFa) is  
simply not the best solution moving forward.

On Aug 11, 2009, at 6:35 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Martin McEvoy wrote:
>>
>> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#selecting-names-when-defining-vocabularies
>>
>> I must have missed it ;) still reverse DNS identifiers are not really
>> people friendly, and make your markup very bulky, I think microdata
>> should have not included them, but that's my personal taste I guess.
>
> I feel the same way about URIs. :-)
>
> That's why I included both; that way people who like one can use  
> that, and
> people who like the other can use that too.


All of my intro simply to say that it's really confusing when you say  
stuff like: "I included both". I think this part is really the crux of  
the matter. You should be consistent and suggest something because you  
have data or real past user experience to prove it's better and not  
include "both" to leave things up to personal taste. I thought HTML5  
was about not making the mistakes of the past. If you leave this up to  
choice, then maybe we need RDFa AND Microdata in HTML5 so people can  
choose, but obviously I believe that would be mistake (without even  
thinking of which one is right or better). I've been watching all of  
this prefix discussion around RDFa hoping to see an improvement on  
CURIE, but nothing jumps out yet. One obvious choice is not to have  
them at all and keep identifiers small. Anyway, I hope we can all  
continue these discussions, because I feel we're making progress and  
in the end it'll pay off for the Web.

-Elias

Received on Tuesday, 11 August 2009 23:13:28 UTC