HTML WG ISSUE 120: Prefix mechanisms for RDFa

I suggest that it may be worthwhile for the TAG to actively track HTML WG 
progress in resolving their ISSUE 120 [1]. Are there any TAG members 
willing to volunteer to follow this, and to provide us a brief status 
report at the F2F? (If I don't get any volunteers, I'll pick a victim, as 
given our earlier work on CURIEs, I do think this is something we should be 
tracking.)

HTML WG issue 120 results from a bug [2] that expressed concerns about the 
prefixing mechanism used by RDFa.  Quoting (selectively) from the issue page:

--------Begin quote from Issue Description-----
HTML+RDFa uses indirect binding of prefixes, similar in spirit and syntax 
to Namespaces in XML. Some argue that this is intrinsically too complicated 
to be a good design for a Web technology:

"The use of prefixes that can be bound to arbitrary strings then combined with
other strings to form a third set of strings is IMHO too complicated for a
technology intended for broad Web deployment (e.g. in text/html)...

[...]

This bug is not arguing against RDFa. It's arguing against a particular 
design decision in RDFa that is not intrinsic to RDFa's design goals."

[...]

The scope of this issue is to determine whether to remove or replace the 
prefix mechanism of HTML+RDFa, or leave it as-is."

--------End quote from Issue Description-----

There was a call for change proposals [3] with a due date of 19 January 
2011, and two proposals were submitted:

Proposal [4], as I understand it, removes support for RDFa prefix 
processing from HTML5; proposal [5] maintains support for prefixes in 
HTML5, and suggests changing the RDFa documentation to put more emphasis on 
use of RDFa without prefixes, to better explain issues relating to 
copy/paste, etc.





[1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/120
[2] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-wg-issue-tracking/2010Sep/0014.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Dec/0065.html
[4] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Change_Proposal_for_ISSUE-120
[5] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/RDFaPrefixesNoChange

Received on Friday, 28 January 2011 16:18:23 UTC