Re: let's keep metadata profiles (head/@profile) in HTML for use in GRDDL etc.

Back in July, Dan Connolly proposed that the profile attribute be allowed on
the head element. As far as I can tell, it still isn't.

Was this change rejected, or just lost in the shuffle?

If it won't be allowed, is there an alternate way to do <a href="
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.3">meta data
profiles</a>?

-- 
Arthur Jennings

On Mon, Jul 9, 2007 at 1:58 PM, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote:

>
> Hello from the W3C GRDDL Working Group,
>
> HTML 4 introduced the profile attribute on the head element
> a URI-based extension hook.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.3
>
> The use of this mechanism is not very common, but some
> communities have endorsed it explicitly, for example:
>
> <head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/">
> <title>Expressing Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link
> elements</title>
>
> in
>  Expressing Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements
>  DCMI Recommendation. 2003-11-30
>  http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/
>
>
> and
>
> <head profile='http://gmpg.org/xmdp/samplehtmlprofile.html'<http://gmpg.org/xmdp/samplehtmlprofile.html%27>
> >
>
> in
>  Xhtml Meta Data Profiles (XMDP)
>  http://gmpg.org/xmdp/description
>
>
> GRDDL is a mechanism for using XML documents, especially XHTML
> documents, as Semantic Web data:
>
> "This GRDDL specification introduces markup based on existing standards
> for declaring that an XML document includes data compatible with the
> Resource Description Framework (RDF) and for linking to algorithms
> (typically represented in XSLT), for extracting this data from the
> document."
>  -- http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/
>
> It lets source documents declare the syntax their written in using
> pointers to convert this syntax to the standard RDF/XML syntax. The
> pointers can be either direct or indirect, via a namespace document
> or HTML profile.
>
> At least a few web sites are using GRDDL to formalize microformats data
> as Semantic Web data:
>  http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/15
>  http://www.semantic-conference.com/2007/sessions/r3.html
> and there are several interoperable implementations and
> a reasonably complete test suite of GRDDL:
>  http://esw.w3.org/topic/GrddlImplementations
>  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/td/test_results
>
> The GRDDL use cases document discusses scenarios where consumers
> use tools like HTML tidy to use HTML documents as if they were
> XML.
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-scenarios/#html_tidy_use_case
>
> While the current scope of GRDDL is limited to XML and XHTML,
> it is mostly specified in terms of XPath, and it seems likely
> that HTML 5 should work with XPath much the way XHTML does,
> so that an HTML 5 parser should take the place of
> HTML tidy plus an XML parser. So it looks technically straightforward
> to revise GRDDL to work with HTML 5. Several of the implementations
> already anticipate such a revision and support HTML documents
> that are not well-formed XML by way of a "tag soup" parser.
>
> The profile attribute on head is noted as one of the
> attributes absent from current HTML 5 drafts.
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/diff/#absent-attributes
>
> We suggest adding it. The specification text in HTML 4 is
> adequate in our experience.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.3
>
> If HTML 5 doesn't preserve this hook from HTML 4
> and XHTML 1, the use of head/@profile will be less
> formally ratified, but it seems unlikely to change.
> Since implementations already exploit, it
> seems likely that authors will continue to use it.
>
> The cost of (re-)standardizing this markup seems moderate
> and less than the value of preserving the current investment
> in head/@profile into HTML 5 combined with the benefit
> of endorsing this connection between HTML 5 and the
> Semantic Web via GRDDL.
>
>
> Dan Connolly and Harry Halpin for the W3C GRDDL Working Group
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2008 09:46:58 UTC