Re: ISSUE-76: Need feedback on splitting Microdata into separate specification

Manu Sporny wrote:
> (bcc: RDFa Developer Community)
> 
> ISSUE-76  : http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/76
> ACTION-139: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/actions/139
> ...

At this point I'd like to remind everybody involved in this discussion 
about why we're having it.

(1) Our charter (<http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html>) states:

"The HTML WG is encouraged to provide a mechanism to permit 
independently developed vocabularies such as Internationalization Tag 
Set (ITS), Ruby, and RDFa to be mixed into HTML documents. Whether this 
occurs through the extensibility mechanism of XML, whether it is also 
allowed in the classic HTML serialization, and whether it uses the DTD 
and Schema modularization techniques, is for the HTML WG to determine."

(2) We've been discussing whether RDFa should be included into HTML5 for 
a long time, and there was certainly no consensus for doing so.

(3) Furthermore, for a long time there was some resistance against 
working on this area at all, mainly from those who are now supporting 
microdata.

(4) In spring, the author of HTML5 unilaterally decided to address the 
use cases in a different way, creating the microdata format. There was 
no WG consensus to do so, not even lazy. Actually, the addition of 
microdata has been controversial from the day it was added.

(5) Summarizing, the *only* reason why microdata is part of HTML5 right 
now is that the author had the power to make it so.

What we're now discussing isn't whether to "drop" microdata, or which 
one is "better", but only whether it should compete with RDFa on equal 
footing. Manu has volunteered not only to author the RDFa-in-HTML spec 
(stand-alone, thankfully), but also to show how microdata *could* be 
moved into a separate spec. Thanks for that, Manu.

BR, Julian

Received on Friday, 16 October 2009 09:10:16 UTC