Re: Justifying breaking backward compatibility based on existing content (was Re: RDF 1.1 Lite Issue # 2: property vs rel)

Very good point.

We will try to scrounge up some actual numbers for you soon.

guha

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 9:47 AM, Stéphane Corlosquet
<scorlosquet@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Henri,
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:00 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 3:28 AM, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@kellogg-assoc.com>
>> wrote:
>> > There are probably some corner cases that would need to be worked out,
>> but
>> > by limiting this to the HTML+RDFa definition, we avoid backwards
>> > compatibility issues with RDFa 1.0 and get that much closer
>>
>> I think efforts to fix RDFa are doomed if they try to be backwards
>> compatible with RDFa 1.0 in the sense that any RDFa 1.0 input you can
>> construct produces the same triples in an RDFa_fixed processor as it
>> would in an RDFa 1.0 processor. If you choose that route, you don't
>> get to *remove* any of the badness of RDFa 1.0. And *removing* badness
>> of RDFa is the kind of fixing RDFa needs. (For example, the obvious
>> conclusion one should make about the statistic Guha provided is that
>> the rel attribute shouldn't participate in RDFa processing.)
>>
>> Note that HTML5 does not try to be backwards-compatible with the HTML
>> 4.01 spec. It tries to be compatible with existing content. That is,
>> it tries to be compatible with content that's actually on the Web--not
>> with content that one could construct based on the HTML 4.01 spec.
>>
>
> Thanks for raising this point, Henri. You bring an interesting
> perspective. I'm curious to know how similar decisions are made in the
> context of HTML5. How does a public working group such a WHATWG (which
> afaik does not have the resources to index the whole web) go about deciding
> what feature or markup pattern can be dropped from a spec? Are
> there representative samples that you use? or is it merely based on what
> feedback you get from people who "show up" and give feedback to the working
> group? Do browser vendors such as Mozilla have any ability to help
> here? What do you do about deep pages hidden behind password or a noindex
> courtesy? Extrapolate the findings from the public web? The RDFa WG is
> seeking ways to assess what patterns are used or not used in the wild
> (tangible numbers or % tend to carry a lot of weight) so any hint would
> help.
>
> Steph.
>