Re: Official Response to ISSUE-130 from RDF Web Apps WG

Hi Henri,

I had pinged you on #WHATWG IRC about this issue earlier this month,
promising you a formal response:

http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20120405#l-964

It's taken a bit longer than I had intended to write it up, apologies :).

The RDF Web Apps Working Group discussed your reply to the official
response to ISSUE-130 and ISSUE-132. The full text of the discussion can
be seen here:

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2012-04-05#Responses_to_Henri_Sivonen

More below...

On 03/15/2012 08:47 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Since @href, @rel and @rev were always defined on all elements in
>> XHTML1+RDFa, changing this would result in a backwards incompatible
>> change and so the Working Group decided to not change this behavior
>> in XHTML1+RDFa 1.1.
>
> Please record me as "disagree" for this decision for disposition of
> comments purposes. (I disagree that the document conformance
> definition for Foo+RDFa 1.1 needs to keep all Foo+RDFa 1.0 content
> conforming. Note that conformance is different from the processing
> rules.)

Noted.

>> Finally, the use of @rel and @rev everywhere cannot be removed
>> without cutting two of the more useful features of RDFa - namely
>> forward chaining and reverse chaining. Doing so would
>> unnecessarily limit the flexibility of the language. So, the
>> Working Group decided that @rel and @rev should still be allowed
>> everywhere in HTML+RDFa.
>
> Please record me as "disagree" for this decision for disposition of
> comments purposes.

Noted.

>> For the purposes of the W3C Process, all of the resolutions that
>> applied to RDFa Core and XHTML+RDFa, resulted in non-substantive
>> changes because they were either vagueness or bugs in the
>> specifications.
>
> I disagree with the notion that fixes to substantive bugs don't
> constitute substantive changes. I object to recording the changes
> here as non-substantive in the disposition of comments.

My response wasn't clear, let me try to clarify further: There were
substantive changes to HTML+RDFa. There were not substantive changes to
RDFa Core and XHTML+RDFa. To make sure that this was the consensus of
the group, we discussed your response. Specifically, this:

"""
Manu Sporny said: Regarding ISSUE-130, he agrees that it should be up to
the Host Language to specify which RDFa attributes to support and where.
He disagrees that @rel and @rev should be allowed everywhere from a
legacy RDFa 1.0 document conformance standpoint, although it seems that
he would be okay with the processor rules not changing. He agrees with
the @src and @href change to HTML+RDFa, but did not see spec text that
achieves this. This is on my plate and I will make sure it gets into the
HTML+RDFa specification. He disagrees that the use of @rel and @rev
everywhere cannot be removed without cutting two of the more useful
features of RDFa - namely forward chaining and reverse chaining. Doing
so would unnecessarily limit the flexibility of the language. It is not
clear why he disagrees, but the WG feels that removing @rel and @rev
everywhere would 1) make it impossible to express certain types of
markup patterns, as previously explained, from being expressible and 2)
lead to a needless difference between XHTML+RDFa and HTML+RDFa. So, the
Working Group still feels that @rel and @rev should still be allowed
everywhere in HTML+RDFa and disagrees with Henri. Finally, Henri
disagrees that these changes were not substantive. We should clarify
that the group feels that the changes were substantive for the HTML+RDFa
specification, but were not substantive to RDFa Core.
"""

followed by this proposal and resolution:

"""
RESOLVED: Regarding ISSUE-130 and ISSUE-132, the Working Group agrees
that substantive changes were made to the HTML+RDFa specification.
Substantive changes were NOT made to the RDFa Core specification.
"""

Since this is an official follow-up to your response to an issue that
you filed, we would appreciate it if you responded to this e-mail and
let us know if the findings made by the group are acceptable to you as
soon as possible.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm Website for Developers Launched
http://digitalbazaar.com/2012/02/22/new-payswarm-alpha/

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2012 03:52:15 UTC