Official Response to ISSUE-131 from RDF Web Apps WG

Hi Niklas,

Thank you for your public feedback on the RDFa 1.1 documents. This is an
official response from the RDF Web Apps WG to your Last Call issue
before we enter the Candidate Recommendation phase for the RDFa 1.1
specifications.

Your issue was tracked here:

https://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/131

Explanation of Issue
--------------------

You were concerned about two things:

1. That @href seemed to have precedence over @content.
2. That @href behaves like @about at times.

You go into depth on the two concerns here:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa-wg/2012Feb/0040.html

Working Group Decision
----------------------

The Working Group discussed the issue at length:

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2012-02-23#ISSUE__2d_131__3a____40_href_overrides___40_content

@href does, in fact, behave like @about at times and has done so since
RDFa 1.0. While the Working Group does agree that this can be confusing
at times, changing it at this stage in the process would not only
introduce a backwards incompatibility, but it may also introduce
unintended side-effects. The group felt that changing this processing
rule would not be wise for RDFa 1.1.

The Working Group found that your first point above, that @href seemed
to have precedence over @content, was not true. Based on the processing
rules, an element containing @href, @property and @content would set the
new subject to the value of @href, the predicate to the value of
@property and the object to the value of @content. However, the group
did find a bug in the processing rules for when the datatype is set to
the empty string on an element that contains @href, @property, @content
and @datatype and resolved to fix this specification bug:

RESOLVED: Fix the specification bug that ignores @datatype in step #11.
(non-substantive)

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2012-02-23#resolution_1

Since the Working Group had always intended the rule to work this way,
and the bug had to do with new text that was added to the processing
rules, this change is non-substantive for the purposes of the W3C Process.

Feedback
--------

Since this is an official Working Group response to your issue, we would
appreciate it if you responded to this e-mail and let us know if the
decision made by the group is 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 Sunday, 26 February 2012 21:52:59 UTC