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

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Shelley Powers
<shelleyp@burningbird.net> wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Karl Dubost <karl@la-grange.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > Le 16 oct. 2009 à 11:40, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
>> >>
>> >> An example of my concern about RDFa is that in uses syntax that in
>> >> Gecko,
>> >> WebKit and Presto parses to a different DOM Level 2 representation in
>> >> text/html and application/xhtml+xml. I can assess whether a proposal
>> >> has
>> >> this property even if the proposal is solving a problem I wouldn't
>> >> personally pursue solving as a priority. This touches on my activities
>> >> as a
>> >> parser developer.
>> >
>> > Are there (or do you know) plans to actually implement into some of the
>> > browsers (only one class of products) either microdata, rdfa or
>> > microformats
>> > in the core parsing engine?
>> >
>> > I know already some implementations of rdfa and microformats, but as
>> > external parser.
>>
>> I'm planning on getting microdata implemented in Firefox. We'd do this
>> by implementing the DOM APIs described in the spec, as well as
>> implement hooks so that it'd be easy to create Firefox extensions that
>> react to microdata formats.
>
> I'm assuming that you would do so if Microdata were separated out into its
> own document. Would that be a correct assumption?

Yes, that is correct.

However I do think that having the WG "choose" a mechanism for
embedding metadata is a good thing. We do after all choose mechanisms
for a lot of other things. For example by putting <video> in the spec
we say that we believe that this is a better way to embed video than
by using <object> and flash. By putting SVG in the spec we say that
this is the way to do vector graphics rather than microsofts VML, etc.

For each problem we solve there are always other ways of solving them.
However we generally pick one and put it in the spec. We don't rely on
external spec and say there are multiple ways of doing something and
you are free to choose any one you want.

/ Jonas

Received on Sunday, 18 October 2009 18:53:23 UTC