Re: Prefixes fail-safe registry thoughts

Manu Sporny wrote:
> 
> - The current RDFa parsing rules don't change for XHTML. In addition,
>   only @prefix should be used in HTML5/XHTML5. This should make the RDFa
>   TF happy.

There is a big gap between what users consider to be XHTML and what 
browsers consider to be XHTML.  In particular, XHTML 1.0 permits the use 
of the text/html mime type.  Whether it should have done so or not is 
beside the point, and whether it actually would apply in this situation 
is not the point either: the fact is that a number of web standards 
advocates have encouraged this practice, and many follow it today 
without understanding the implications.

The biggest being that no browser treats text/html responses as XML.

We live in a view-source/copy-paste world.  Prefix will quickly show up 
in XHTML and xml:cc has already shown up in HTML.

Consider the target audience of the following page, and the likelihood 
that such an audience will understand the distinction and follow it 
correctly:

http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/SUBM-ccREL-20080501/

Planet produces output via XSLT that is capable of being served as 
application/xhtml+xml, that being said many people (e.g. planet html5) 
take such output and serve it with a text/html MIME type.  Additionally, 
the page itself is produced by combining data from multiple input 
sources.  Simply put: having two different syntaxes with zero overlap 
makes RDFa impractical for me.

- Sam Ruby