- From: Shelley Powers <shelleyp@burningbird.net>
- Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:40:48 -0500
- To: public-html@w3.org
> On Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:39:00 +0200, Shelley Powers > <shelleyp@burningbird.net> wrote: > > Forget RDFa for the moment: what is it about Microdata that's > important > > to you, personally? > > Microdata is basically microformats without all the problems and without > the complexity of RDFa. Anne, thank you for the response. I know the problems people have had with microformats: they're not precise. However, they have achieved a significant level of popularity, and I believe the lack of mechanistic precision may actually help. Too much specification, and microformats may have become intimidating to the average Jane and Joe. Someone in one of the threads, I think it was Brendan Eich, mentioned something about not over specifying a specification, to allow customization or innovation or some such thing. Apologies if I took this out of context, but I think that is a viable concern, and a valid interest. But I'm not a big microformats person, so I won't attempt to defend it any more. I don't want to defend RDFa, either. HTML+RDFa is being published as a separate document. RDFa in XHTML has enough use that whatever the HTML5 working group does really isn't going to impact on its increasing adoption or continued use. So, I think it doesn't serve the needs of the group to focus on what's a done deal. So, I return to the same question I asked Henri: what does Microdata provide that you need, or want, personally? Not the fact that it isn't RDFa or Microformats, neither of these strike me as a strong argument favoring Microdata. I don't think it speaks well of Microdata that the only support it seems to have is from people who don't like something else. I would think that people would have to be interested in Microdata for itself, don't you think? Outside of that, why do you feel that it _has_ to be in the HTML5 specification? We talked about all markup being in the HTML5 spec, but RDFa isn't, microformats won't be--we've seen that extensions or uses of the markup can exist independently. Why is it essential for Microdata to actually be part of the HTML5 specification? > > I don't think removing Microdata from HTML5 because HTML5 is too big > is a > good argument personally. I agree that it would be good if HTML5 was > made > smaller, but then we should make an effort to remove the bits that are > not > (proposed to be) core to HTML. Rather it should be about splitting out > the > Window object, script execution, event loop and queue, and other such > aspects. That would make the specification on HTML more focused I think, > removing core bits of the language just makes it scattered. > > I agree with you about removing the Window object, script execution, event loop and queue and so on. I agree 100% that it would make the spec more focused. Hopefully a closer look at these issues would be a healthy next, and separate step, from this discussion. Shelley
Received on Thursday, 15 October 2009 14:41:26 UTC