Re: Change Proposals and FPWD Resolutions

Hi, Manu and Chairs!

Dear Chairs, I'm with Manu in asking for this alternative to be made explicit in the poll. No need to have yet another Change Proposal differing only in this point.

> My
> intent was to ensure that Microdata continues to be worked. I'm averse
> to giving the impression that we're prematurely tabling this particular
> technology.
So am I. Indeed, as I hinted in my previous mail, Microdata has some advantages (*) over RDFa 1.0 and it would be wise to give them further consideration, probably within the work of the planned RDFa WG where political tension won't be so strong. Merging the two to combine their strengths would be a likely outcome, albeit not the only possible. I believe that by not publishing a Microdata WD in this WG won't put it at risk of being forgotten or neglected by the community interested in solving the use cases for lightweight extensible semantic annotation (or embedding of semantics, if somebody fancies encoding in RDFa something utterly unrelated to the document). The main benefits of Microdata are more likely to find their way to developers and users of the Semantic Web if the HTML WG doesn't publish it as a WD, since it would primarily serve as a political move against the work on RDFa and Semantic Web, extensibility and modularity in general.

ad (*):
1. Tight integration with random bits of the HTML5 vocabulary is not one of them. Perhaps a mechanism (with a default for HTML) for declaring lists such as Toby's would turn it into something desirable by the community, as it would then be applicable to other vocabularies. As a general remark, it seems that many communities questioning the shameless abundance of quirks and special cases in HTML5 wouldn't object (or at least much less) to introducing generic mechanisms instead with defaults for HTML5. Otherwise I sympathise with unwillingness to upgrade XML/Semantic Web/HTTP/URI/MIME/DOM/etc. stacks and toolsets and clutter the relevant specs without added benefits for anything else than HTML5.
2. I'm probably not the only one who both wants the Semantic Web development to be catered for and sees some benefits of Microdata which RDFa 1.0 lacks. I believe it's the political pressure of the main forces behind HTML5 and inability to amicably resolve any of the more fundamental issues with its current direction that makes many shy away from discussing those benefits. The RDFa WG will hopefully change this.

Best regards,

Krzysztof Maczyński

Received on Wednesday, 9 December 2009 16:35:15 UTC