Re: GRDDL and HTML5

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, Danny Ayers wrote:
> 
> > Well those pages rarely will have that information (e.g. the XFN 
> > profile page doesn't), so whatever mechanism is used to work around 
> > that should just always assume that all the profiles are available.
> 
> To date microformats.org (and as far as I've seen the majority of 
> microformat publishers) haven't exactly jumped on the notion of 
> URI-based extensibility

GRDDL isn't going to work very well using the profile="" attribute if it 
requires something that profiles don't do.


> > Or, you could use some GRDDL-specific link, e.g. <link 
> > rel=transformation>, to do it, if you are willing to limit GRDDL's 
> > usefulness to pages that are expecting GRDDL to be used on them.
> 
> It's not an exclusive or. What troubles me though is the potential 
> exclusion of the option for producers and/or consumers of the HTML 
> markup to choose their own way of expressing data.

There's no exclusion, we have a generic extension mechanism for linking to 
things (<link rel>).


> Truth be known, I am attracted to Dan's attitude - "I'm content for the 
> market to choose" [1], despite my having yet to see evidence of the 
> wisdom of crowds (including software companies ;-)

The market has already chosen -- the vast majority of pages that use 
Microformats or other mechanisms that are supposed to have profile="" 
values (e.g. hCard, Dublin Core metadata, etc) don't have them. That's why 
we're dropping it from HTML5. There's no point including a feature that in 
practice is ignored.

To be honest I don't really understand the reluctance from the GRDDL 
community here. profile="" doesn't work, people don't use it. Surely the 
right thing to do is to take that into account and fix GRDDL to work with 
real world content. Why would you want to cling to something that has 
widely been ignored and will make it harder to use GRDDL on the Web?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 25 August 2008 10:02:29 UTC