- From: Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>
- Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 21:24:31 -0500
- To: Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
- CC: HTML WG <w3c-html-wg@w3.org>, "public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf.w3.org" <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>
Actually, there is more to it than this. I appreciate that what we are saying is that the meta element allows the specification of certain metadata properties about the document or about segments of the document. However, this is completely separate from the setting of XHTML attribute values. The fact that there is a title attribute on every element, and that there is also a potential title metadata property, is no doubt intentional. But I do not think that we can require that XHTML conforming user agents somehow overlay that property onto the attribute value.... It is fine to require that the attribute value be interpreted as an RDF predicate, since that is specialized processing. The RDF-ness of XHTML is a happy side effect that can be derived by RDF-aware agents. It is not something that I think we are mandating be available in every user agent. So, what am I driving at here? It comes down to the XML DOM. If I am relying upon that DOM and its structure to find information about a document, and I want to know the title associated with an element, I am going to look at the value of the title attribute. I am NOT going to hunt around for random meta elements that are children of that element. I am surely NOT going to look for meta elements anywhere in the document that might have an about attribute that references my target. That would be insane. My proposal here is simple but potentially destabilizing: Change the property attribute value "title" to something else. Decouple that particular piece of metadata from the markup. For now, I will call it "bagel". If we like, we *could* say that when processing XHTML documents using RDF aware parsers, a triple is *also* formed based upon the title attribute of an element, if any. That would at least garner a lot of fun metadata for free (every href with a title has some semantics). But if we just decouple these then there will be no confusion and no expectation that the DOM does anything to attempt to propagate these "properties" into the corresponding attribute values. In addition, I recommend we design a DOM extension (optional DOM feature?) that allows me to explicitly search for this type of metadata. document.findMeta(idref, propertyName) or something. At least then I would know if I had some portable way to try and find this stuff. Otherwise, I think we are violating the principle of least surprise - and that is never good. Steven Pemberton wrote: > > We have said in XHTML2 that things like > > <a title="gezellig" href="gezellig.html">gezellig</a> > > is equivalent to > > <a href="gezellig.html"> > <meta property="title" content="gezellig"/> > gezellig > </a> > > The question has arisen, what happens with: > > <a title="Peioria" href="gezellig.html"> > <meta property="title" content="gezellig"/> > gezellig > </a> > > From an RDF point of view, there's no problem (the element has two > titles) but what should a browser do with respect to, for instance, > tool tips? > > Steven > -- Shane P. McCarron Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120 Managing Director Fax: +1 763 786-8180 ApTest Minnesota Inet: shane@aptest.com
Received on Thursday, 15 June 2006 02:24:48 UTC