Re: ISSUE-53: mediatypereg - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On 3 Sep 2009, at 11:32, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:19:09 +0200, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>  
> wrote:
>> On 3 Sep 2009, at 09:50, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> HTML4 defined it as taking a single URI.
>>
>> The DTD defines it as %URI; (which is just an alias for CDATA  
>> though). The recommendation text states "this attribute specifies  
>> the location of one or more meta data profiles, separated by white  
>> space."
>
> Wow, bonus points for selectively quoting.

The rest of the paragraph is not relevant to a discussion of the  
syntax of the profile attribute - the rest of the paragraph is  
concerned with the semantics of the URLs.

As Julian pointed out, there is an apparent inconsistency between the  
DTD and the prose of the recommendation, but it seems pretty obvious  
that a whitespace delimited list of URIs is intended - if documentary  
evidence is required, take a look at XHTML 1.1 where the  
inconsistency is resolved, in favour of a list of URIs.

If you want to talk about the semantics, it's certainly true that  
HTML 4 only assigns meaning to the first URI; however it is left open  
for other specifications to assign meaning to subsequent URIs in the  
list. GRDDL and XMDP are two specifications which assign meaning to  
all the URIs in the list.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Thursday, 3 September 2009 11:41:59 UTC