Re: Publishing a new draft (HTML5+RDFa)

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Sam Ruby wrote:
>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> It seems that some WG participants are uncomfortable with a perception 
>>> of forks or branches, and I've suggested a way to proceed that would 
>>> appear less forky.
>> My observation is simply this: such a proposal would be more credible if 
>> it were applied equally to micro-data and RDFa.
> 
> The reason microdata is in HTML5 and RDFa is not is that RDFa has 
> fundamental technical problems 

As has been stated numerous times, what you are claiming to be
"technical problems" are, in fact, "personal preferences based on design
philosophy".

However, I'm more than happy to discuss these issues again until this
notion of RDFa "having fundamental technical problems" becomes resolved.
Either you're not getting what we're saying, or we're not getting what
you are saying. So, let's try this again.

There was a very long set of discussions that we've had that resulted in
every demonstrable technical issue that HTML5+RDFa has, being recorded
here:

http://rdfa.info/wiki/rdfa-in-html-issues

We asked that others, including you, modify the wiki page to document
real technical problems. Philip and Julian took us up on the offer, you
have yet to do so. If you look toward the bottom of the page, you will
see that we've been working through these issues over the past several
weeks:

http://rdfa.info/wiki/rdfa-in-html-issues#RDFa_Task_Force_Discussion_Order

> For example, the use of prefixes

If I understand you correctly, the use of prefixes is a "personal
preferences based on design philosophy" disagreement that you have as
you have yet to produce a technical problem with the use of prefixes.
How does that feature break UAs?

> the exclusive use of URIs for identifiers

Again, if I understand you correctly, the use of "URIs-as-identifiers"
is a "personal preferences based on design philosophy" disagreement that
you have as you have been unable to produce a technical problem with the
use of "URIs-as-identifiers". How does that feature break UAs?

> the use of rev="", the use of rel="" in a manner incompatible 
> with the rest of HTML

What is the "technical problem" here? How is this breaking UAs?

> the overly complicated processing model

Again, does this break UAs? We have more than 7 RDFa processor
implementations now, so the issue isn't developer-oriented. If you mean
that it's overly-complicated for authors, then it might be -- but the
same amorphous claim could be made for large swaths of HTML5, SVG and
Javascript. So, what exactly is the "technical problem" with the
processing model?

> the presence of features that aren't necessary (such as 
> per-value data typing)

Again, your personal preference. There are some that would like to be
able to assign types to data. How is this a "technical problem"?

> the ability to include multiple name-value pairs per element.

Personal preference - what "technical problem" does this create in UAs?

If you can come up with some code to demonstrate any of the above as
fundamental technical problems, the RDFa community would be thrilled to
add it to the list of items on the rdfa-in-html-issues page and start
working on a set of solutions to the problem. I say "thrilled" because
we would finally have a new issue that is tangible.

If you can explain any of the items above in enough detail, I will even
try my hardest to write some HTML or Javascript code to demonstrate the
issue across browsers. I haven't been able to do so because you have
continued to be vague about all of the "technical problems" above...
that or I'm incredibly dense, which is a possibility I'm always open
to... :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.1 Released - Browser-based P2P Commerce
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/06/29/browser-based-p2p-commerce/

Received on Friday, 31 July 2009 06:39:17 UTC