- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 10:51:58 -0600
- To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: Dominique Hazaël-Massieux <dom@w3.org>, public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org
On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 09:52, Brian McBride wrote: [...] > > > and I wonder about using the same machanism as browsers use to > > > specify a stylesheet, i.e a processing instruction. > > > > How is a processing instruction easier than an attribute? > > I'm not defending it, but it would be a uniform mechanism for all XML > documents. Its a shame that XHTML is treated differently. Is the reason > for this that adding the attribute would break the DTD? DTD-happiness is one motivation, but a stronger one is that the XHTML has an explicit flexibility point in head/@profile, but an agreement around a processing instruction doesn't layer neatly that way. That is: everybody is currently free to stick all sorts of processing instructions in their XHTML document, and we have no right to retrospectively specify what they mean. We could earn the right by consent-of-the-governed standards-making. But exploiting URI flexibility points is so much more neat, clean, and fun! It's analagous to this situation: "If the HTML author understood and agreed to these encoding conventions, then their HTML document will conform to the syntactic conventions. In this case, the mapping preserves the author's meaning. But an author may have accidentally conformed to the syntactic conventions without any knowledge of Dublin Core at all. In that case, the mapping most likely does not preserve the author's meaning." -- http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec#intro Substitute GRDDL for Dublin Core, and processing instructions for <meta> elements, et voila. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2004 19:14:01 UTC