Re: FPWD Review Request: HTML+RDFa

Hi Henri,

Whilst I disagree with your points -- see below -- I'm not trying to
claim that what I'm saying is clear in the spec. In fact, speaking for
myself I realise now that these kinds of issues should really be much
better explained.

But I'm afraid that doesn't change the substance of the argument, it
merely means we have a lot of work to do to sort this out.

Anyway, to your points:


On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Henri Sivonen<hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
> On Sep 3, 2009, at 15:06, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>> Treating xmlns as any other attribute seems like a violation of the
>> architecture of Namespaces in XML to me. I.e. a layering violation.
>
>
> Indeed, namespace declarations in XML don't appear in the [attributes]
> property of an element information item in the Infoset. They appear in the
> [namespace attributes] property and also affect the [in-scope namespaces]
> property.
>
> See http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#infoitem.element

Sure.

But that's not the DOM, which is what everyone seemed to be talking
about before.

The original objection was that different processing is required for
different DOMs, and I think we've shown that's not the case; all that
is required is to iterate through the list of atttributes, and pull
out those that begin "xmlns:".

It's much the same as you might implement a processor for the HTML5
attributes that begin "data-".


> It's highly unusual at the W3C to layer a spec (other than Namespaces itself
> of course) directly on top of XML 1.0 instead of layering it on top of XML +
> Namespaces (or the Infoset).

But the thing is, RDFa doesn't actually _use_ namespaces.

It's much the same for HTML and XHTML -- RDFa doesn't sit on top of
them, either. RDFa is a cross-cutting technology, which can be
incorporated into any language, and when it is, it works alongside
that language.

RDFa essentially provides a way to assign consistent semantics to
attributes in a host language. So it doesn't "sit on top of" anything
-- XML namespaces, XML lang, the @href attribute...whatever.

Regards,

Mark

-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

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Received on Friday, 4 September 2009 09:43:34 UTC