Re: Concerns about new section "predefined vocabularies"

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On May 13, 2009, at 4:52 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm very concerned about what's going on here in the spec -- see 
>> <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#vcard>.
>>
>> This mainly replicates information from the IETF vCard spec (RFC 
>> 2739). I realize that the author may think that that spec is not 
>> sufficient; but the right way to fix this is to participate in 
>> revising it (see 
>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev-07> and 
>> <http://tools.ietf.org/wg/vcarddav/>), not by creating a copy in W3C 
>> space.
> 
> It seems to me that this section defines how to extract vCard fields 
> from an alternate serialization (HTML5 + microdata), and how to parse 
> and validate  that alternate serialization, but defers to vCard for the 
> details of interpreting the fields.
> 
> That seems about right to me. It's also pretty much the way the hCard 
> microformat does it.
> ...

Yes,

but the hCard microformat isn't defined in the HTML spec.

So, my issues are:

Procedural - the WG is working on trying to find consensus on all 
sections of the spec; sections without consensus are to be removed (at 
least that's my understanding of the process). Also, the editor himself 
announced a "feature freeze" quite some time ago. So, why are we seeing 
these new sections without *any* prior discussion?

Spec Size - the spec already is big, and there is no evidence that this 
needs to be specified *inside* the HTML5 spec.

Extensibility - the current chapter copies terminology from RFC2426, but 
misses it's extensibility hooks, and thus fails to mention things that 
have been defined later, such as the IMPP type name.

Parsing - for some types, parsing rules are being rephrased from 
RFC2426. There is a risk that they diverge.

Versioning - the IETF is revising vCard, see 
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev-07>. Is HTML5 
going to freeze the vocabulary at a version that the IETF is currently 
obsoleting?

So, I do agree that it's a good exercise to define how to expose vCard 
data in RDFa and/or "microdata". But please do so in a separate 
document, and without ignoring current IETF work.

BR, Julian

Received on Friday, 15 May 2009 13:39:39 UTC