Re: Normative vs Informative

On 27 Nov 2011, at 18:37, Peter Williams wrote:

> I dont have any strong technical opinion. I do have a rational, though.
>  
> What I like about the RDFa of today is that it works with the actual web.

*works* is a tricky beast. It worked with the particular tools you used — but you were, in effect, lucky. RDFa + tag soup is a huge undefined mess right now.

I’m not opposed to RDFa, or microdata, or microformats for serialising the WebID graphs — but specs have to be solid enough that consuming applications will behave consistently when they encounter them, especially if the scenarios are (as you've tried) sprinkling attributes into somebody else’s markup. A WebID spec which says you can use RDFa but very few people being able to (through circumstance) use RDFa to *its* spec means that WebID consumers will be spotty, at best, and the whole tech will end up being branded unreliable — I don’t particularly want to see that happen.

M.

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Received on Sunday, 27 November 2011 20:02:00 UTC