[Bug 15913] HTML+RDFa adds href, src, rev and rel attributes to all elements

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15913

--- Comment #1 from Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org> 2012-02-07 03:41:46 UTC ---
I'm in complete agreement with Henri on this bug.

As somebody who has recently just spent a significant amount of time trying to
implement schema support for full RDFa in HTML, I can say that re-purposing
existing HTML attributes for uses in HTML+RDFa that they don't have in HTML
itself is not a good idea.

The result is confusing for users because they now have to deal with attempting
to evaluate two sets of conflicting conformance contraints for the same
attribute. And it is complicated to implement schema support and validation
support for those attributes without just completely relaxing -- for all cases
-- the existing constraints in the HTML spec. (Even after having spent quite a
bit of time on trying to correctly express the HTML+RDFa constraints in the
schema, I'm still not convinced I've got it right. Part of that is also due to
the ambiguities in the spec that Henri has pointed out.)

And the effect that all can have on users it that it may cause them to not be
alerted about problems the validator otherwise would have caught and reported
to them. In particular, I can imagine cases where a user is accidentally
(mis)using an HTML attribute in a particular way -- not with the intent to use
it in the context of full RDFa -- and so we are not going to be able to have
the validator report the mistake to them in the way it would be otherwise.

For those reasons, I think it makes sense to encourage general users to stick
to RDFa Lite unless they are consciously choosing otherwise, and for that to be
the default for validation. And I think it make sense to then expose full RDFa
validation to users who are knowingly and intentionally opting in to using the
full set of RDFa attributes (instead of doing it accidentally) and who really
know what they are doing.

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Received on Tuesday, 7 February 2012 03:43:36 UTC