Re: HTML WG: ISSUE-120 Use of prefixes is too complicated for a Web technology

On 24.09.2010 09:39, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> On 24 Sep 2010, at 08:25, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> On 24.09.2010 01:08, Sam Ruby wrote:
>>> On 09/23/2010 06:21 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>>> On 23.09.2010 22:04, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>>>> ...
>>>>> what their position is on adding this to new features). IMHO there's
>>>>> not really much point discussing features that browser vendors aren't
>>>>> willing to implement.
>>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> Are you saying that for this use case, browser vendors are more
>>>> important like, for instance, search engines?
>>>
>>> Julian: can you convert this statement into one that points out a
>>> specific feature of HTML5 that breaks, for example, search engines?
>>
>> No. It was just a reply to the claim that browsers are the only HTML consumers of importance.
>
> I don't see any such claim in the quoted text.

"IMHO there's not really much point discussing features that browser 
vendors aren't willing to implement"

> Do browsers /need/ to "the only HTML consumers of importance" for their refusal to implement a particular syntax for metadata to make it a non-starter? If we're going to bother to add metadata to documents, don't we want browsers (as well as search engines) to be able to extract and present that data to users? For example, if I was using a citation vocabulary, I'd want people to be able to write browsers with built-in features like Zotero:
>
> http://www.zotero.org/
>
> to extract my citations, or at least to be able to write browsers with APIs that made it easier to write such add-ons.

Nice example. Zotero *does* use prefix-based indirection to extract 
metadata, without specific browser support to do so. This proves that 
it's possible, and does get implemented despite the lack of "browser 
vendors interest".

> Browsers are certainly not the only important consumer. But I think they are a *critical* consumer.

I don't believe they are *that* critical for this use case. Of course it 
would be nice if browsers made use of additional metadata at some point 
of time, but that doesn't mean it's necessary to deploy these kind of 
extensions.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Friday, 24 September 2010 08:03:10 UTC