Re: Working Group Decision on ISSUE-120 rdfa-prefixes

On 03/29/2011 05:15 PM, James Graham wrote:
> On 03/29/2011 04:59 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
>> Running examples from the OpenGraph Protocol site through the
>> facebook linter shows that removing the prefix declaration has no
>> effect but changing it prevents any properties from being recognised.
>> Code inspection of some of the other tools indicates that there are
>> clients in Python, PHP, Ruby and Java that depend on literal matching
>> of the string "og:".
>>
>> No change proposal was put forward suggesting that all usages be
>> migrated to fixed prefixes. Nor was there any evidence put forward
>> that fixes to these tools would break content.
>
> I believe that is actually mentioned in the adopted change proposal:
>
> "It is correct to say that the usage of the Facebook terms also reveal
> problems around namespaces insofar as many sites do not follow the
> advise of Facebook and do not add the right namespaces"
>
> So it is clear that for backward-compatible processing of actual
> OpenGraph content one must not use prefixes but must treat the name as
> opaque. (I mention as an aside that this also implies that one cannot
> use the og: prefix in some other context since it may cause the data to
> be misappropriated as OpenGraph data).
>
>> The fact that these
>> tools have bugs is uncontested but that, in itself, does not help
>> identify the proposal that draws the weakest objections.
>
> Did you consider my further point that widespread failure to implement
> the prefix mechanism in client software provides clear evidence that the
> prefix mechanism is too complex for some constituency, either authors or
> implementors?

Do the chairs intend to respond to my request for clarification about 
the decision?

Received on Wednesday, 6 April 2011 14:04:16 UTC