Re: Possible *third* proposal for ISSUE-41 Distributed Extensibility

On 03/30/2010 10:14 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Sam Ruby wrote:
>>
>> License information is an example of annotation that is added to web
>> pages which is meant to be parsed software that is independent of the
>> site.  Some believe that RDFa is the way to capture such annotation.
>> Some believe that Microdata is the way to capture such.  I don't happen
>> to believe that there is one true way.
>
> We're far more likely to make the Web a useful place if there is one true
> way, whatever that way is.
>
> Not having one true way is the same as not having interoperability. That's
> a bad thing. It's what working groups like this one are intended to
> prevent. If the use case for "ISSUE-41 Distributed Extensibility"
> mechanisms is explicitly to make it possible to do things that don't have
> interoperability, then I for one would consider that a step backwards.
> That's an anti-goal.

Can we agree that "the one true way" is RDFa?  Profile attributes?  Any 
of the following:

 
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#HTML5_should_support_a_way_for_anyone_to_invent_new_elements.21

Looking at a mere few dozen pages, it is clear to me that authors as a 
whole don't respect our dominion over their ability to be creative.  I 
do believe that we can help channel things a bit, but outright outlawing 
things that are popular and demonstrably useful is as likely to be as 
effective as the eighteenth amendment to the US consitituion was.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2010 11:45:45 UTC