[Bug 12854] I am quite surprised to see that things such as the list of allowed values for the "rel" attribute of the "link" tag (aka. the list of link types) as well as the list of allowed values for the "name" attribute of the "meta" tag are supposed to be listed o

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12854

Antoine Amarilli <a3nm@free.fr> changed:

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--- Comment #2 from Antoine Amarilli <a3nm@free.fr> 2011-06-03 05:05:17 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> Plenty of things rely on registries.  You have to use common sense: if the IETF
> registry for MIME types is down due to a network outage at the data center they
> use, that doesn't suddenly make all MIME types invalid until it's back up.

Okay, I admit that this point of mine was probably a bit far-fetched.

> Likewise, if the wiki page is briefly vandalized, wait until it's fixed.  As
> Wikipedia demonstrates, things like deleting the page contents don't have to
> last long on a wiki.

This is no problem for a human, indeed, but the standard specifically indicates
that compliance checkers must abide by the wiki page, and they cannot show
common sense to estimate if the current state of the wiki page is sane.

>   The microformats wiki has served as a de facto registry
> for a long time.

I understand that. My point is that this should continue to remain unofficial,
and probably be mentioned by the standard though not in a normative sense.

> If there turn out to be practical problems with using a wiki for an official
> registry, that can be dealt with at the time, possibly by requiring wiki edits
> to undergo moderation or similar.

This is not allowed by the current wording of the standard, which states that
"Anyone is free to edit the Microformats wiki existing-rel-values page at any
time to add a type." The standard even states that "conformance checkers should
offer to add [unknown values] to the Wiki" (supposedly to make the document
valid).

>   However, there's no reason to worry until it
> proves to be a problem in practice.  Other registries (like the MIME type
> registry) have tended to be extremely incomplete or out-of-date because of the
> difficulty of registering new entries.  It's worth trying to find out if this
> way works better.

I think you can get the best of both worlds by indicating the Wiki as a
recommended discussion page in the standard, but not as part of the norm. I
fail to see how the currently proposed approach is better: it imposes a burden
on compliance checkers, and amounts to the same as accepting mostly anything
(if compliance checkers really allow users to add any value they like to the
wiki to make their documents valid, do you really expect the wiki to be useful
to standardize attribute values?).

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Received on Friday, 3 June 2011 05:05:19 UTC