Re: GRDDL and HTML5

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>
> Users have not used profile="" for any of the other vocabularies on any
> sort of consistent basis, so there's no reason to think they'd do anything
> different for new vocabularies.
>
>
> Based on the existing profiles, it hardly ever happens. It seems
> reasonable to extrapolate that this will continue to not happen much.
>
What frustrates me is the number of people who believe we should drop
elements and attributes from the spec that don't seem to get much use
in practice.  What if a new version of HTML came out after 4.01 (let's
say 4.1) and let's say it came out around 2002.  At that point there
was no widespread adoption of web standards and most websites were
still being designed using table-based layouts.  Using the logic from
above, this new 4.1 version of HTML would have been correct to simply
drop every under-utilized element and attribute in the entire spec.
Taking this to the extreme, and we would have been left with an HTML
spec of nothing more than tables and font tags.  Clearly the web
community as a whole as moved forward from such days.  What's to say
the community will not engage in widespread use of @profile in the
future?  (possibly for even more functionality than GRDDL utilizes
today?)

There needs to be more justification to remove an element or attribute
other than "it's not used much".  Removing elements that have better
semantic alternatives is one such reason, but is not the case with
@profile. (Using rel="" is arguably even less semantic as HTML4
already defines @profile for metadata extensibility)  I still see no
reason that justifies removing @profile especially when there is still
such strong community support for it.  So without any compelling
argument to remove it, what exactly is the harm in keeping it?

Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2008 13:20:12 UTC