Re: RDFa and Web Directions North 2009

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> 
>> My statement was in response to a statement that I have seen often made that
>> there are no differences that affect application programmers.  Such a
>> statement is provably false.  The people making these statements aren't
>> dummies; it simply is the case that the differences are subtle and
>> non-obvious and tend to be glossed over by those that know better.
> 
> I have no idea what this means.
> 
> What is a 'difference that affects application programmers', that is
> being glossed over? If you want to write a parser...you just have to
> get on and write it. There's no 'easy' and 'difficult' route, and
> certainly no 'difficult' route that is being glossed over.
> 
> Having said that, I haven't seen any of the kinds of statements that
> you refer to; perhaps you can provide some links?

I believe I already provided one:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-January/018242.html

>> Actually, I say differences.  I only have an existence proof for one
>> difference at the moment.  Is there more?  Beats me.  Hence my assertion
>> that a definitive list would be helpful.
> 
> As I said, the "existence proof" of which you speak (Henri's one),
> proves only that namespace properties do not exist in an HTML DOM,
> whilst they do in an XHTML DOM.
> 
> That's very different from being an "existence proof" that there are
> two (or more) algorithms for parsing RDFa in a DOM, since RDFa does
> not require namespaces per se.

I've run a few simple tests with both XML and HTML parsers, and can now 
see how this is the case.

- Sam Ruby