Re: PROPOSAL from telecon on XMLLiteral

Manu,

On 28 Jul 2009, at 06:16, Manu Sporny wrote:
> Now that you know that we're not taking this change lightly and that  
> we
> would ask for community feedback before making the change, do you  
> still
> feel as apprehensive about the change as you did before?

To an extent. I would view it as an acceptable change if

   (a) it was accompanied by a version change in RDFa (ie instead of  
version="XHTML+RDFa 1.0", people would put version="XHTML+RDFa 2.0" or  
version="XHTML+RDFa 1.1" in their documents in order for the new rule  
to take effect)

   (b) that new specification included a section on backward- 
incompatible changes that listed this as one of those changes

   (c) the location of the DTD changed, such that existing documents  
did not automatically get updated to this new version

I think it will be very hard to ascertain whether people are  
generating XMLLiterals now by accident (ie they add RDFa to their  
documents but don't check the RDF that gets generated to make sure  
it's what they intended) or on purpose (ie they author it according to  
the RDFa 1.0 specification and the XMLLiterals are exactly what they  
do intend), but it wouldn't hurt to get more data about how (much)  
XMLLiterals are used in the wild.

I don't have any objections to the change from a publishing or parsing  
standpoint. For processors that wish to continue to support RDFa 1.0,  
it will obviously add a little extra complexity to check the version  
before determining which rules to use. Which is why procedurally, all  
I'm asking is that backwards-incompatible differences are kept to a  
minimum, with RDFa's development being bundled into a few, infrequent  
releases rather than multiple frequent ones.

Thanks,

Jeni
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 14:49:36 UTC