RE: GRDDL and HTML5

Jason Karns wrote:
> 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?

+1

Consumers of a particular language may request the inclusion of features that only match narrow or proprietary use cases, and the language development group acts rightly in pruning such features.  General extensibility points, however, should be given significantly more latitude, as they can allow the language to be taken in new directions in the future.  In fact, such extensibility points can help to address the narrow and proprietary use cases mentioned above.

Take care,

    John L. Clark


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