Re: Request to publish HTML+RDFa (draft 3) as FPWD

Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>> By the HTML WG's Design Principles, error handling needs to be defined.
>>> It's not good enough to say that it's an error, so don't do that.
>> The design principles also say "pave the cowpaths", yet HTML5 defines an
>> entirely new syntax.
>>
>> So citing the principles doesn't seem to be productive here.
> 
> Isn't paving cowpaths *exactly* what we're doing here? HTML5 describes
> the syntax used for the billions of HTML documents browsed by people
> every day better than any other specification draft I've ever seen.
> And I've worked decently closely with the HTML parser in Gecko for
> many years now.
> 
> For the first time ever there is actually a document which we can
> check our implementation against and fix bugs, rather than having to
> guess what most pages expect.
> 
> If that's not paving a cowpath then I guess we have a different
> understanding of that principle.
> 
> Additionally, I don't understand your logic that if we in some part of
> the spec had decided not to follow a principle (which I maintain isn't
> the case here), then we should throw out an entirely different
> principle in an entirely different context?

I didn't intend to say that.

When I said "The design principles also say "pave the cowpaths", yet 
HTML5 defines an entirely new syntax." I referred to Microdata, which is 
in direct competition in RDFa, and which clearly violates another design 
principle.

So, statements with respect to "blocking" publication of a WF for RDFa 
in HTML because it is in conflict with one design principle do not 
compute for me. Unless we apply the same rule for Microdata.

BR, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 22 September 2009 08:20:59 UTC