Re: Decentralised extensibility idea (ISSUE-41)

Julian Reschke, Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:29:46 +0100:
> Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Julian Reschke  wrote:
>>> Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>>> The second isn't really distributed extensibility, because the
>>>> browsers have to support each vocab manually.
>>> I disagree that this isn't D.E. You seem to assume the D.E. implies some
>>> kind of code-on-demand, which IMHO is not what most people think. 
>>> Otherwise XML namespaces wouldn't qualify either.
>> 
>> I'm making a slightly subtler point.  Microdata, RDFa, and even XML
>> Namespaces can all be processed with a generic processor that has no
>> information about the actual vocabularies being used.  You can just
>> say "Find me all the items/triples/namespaced elements on the page",
>> and it can do it.  Thus the extensibility granted by these
>> technologies is distributed, as no central authority has to recognize
>> and bless your vocab for it to be processable by generic tools.
> 
> Understood.
                                                  <corr>
> "This is the well-known issue of @profile allowing to signal the 
> presence of a specific extension, but not being able to identify 
> where exactly it is used; so it doesn't disambiguate."
                                                  </corr>
> I like @profile mainly for it being there already, but I do see it's 
> of limited value.

If @profile is of limited use, now, then Tobys DE proposal increases 
its precision w.r.t identifying where exactly the profile which the 
@profile points to is applied, by the fact that

 * @profile can be placed on any element

The precision is increased even more by because HTML5 allows @class on 
all elements.

A best practise which included the use of prefixes in the class names 
and the data-* attributes, could increase the precision probably close 
to the level of a namespaced solution.

I am puzzled by the remark from Tab. Profiles only makes use of 
existing features within HTML. Thus it is the most generic solution of 
all D.E. solutions. It also uses the same extension method that HTML5 
iself uses: @profile is only a way for pointing to an applicable 
specification without having to wade through the wg desert. 
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 16 January 2010 16:28:13 UTC