Re: HREF attribute in elements other than A and LINK

As I said before: this is not a technical issue. It is a social
decision, so to say

ivan

Shane McCarron wrote:
> For the record, I don't really mind one way or the other.  It is on
> every element in the xhtml-rdfa draft [1], DTD and XML Schema now
> because I was asked to migrate the modules from working in XHTML M12N 2
> to working in XHTML M12N 1.1.  There is nothing in the current work
> that, as far as I know, requires that @href and its associated other
> attributes from XHTML 2 be incorporated into RDFa in an XHTML 1.1
> context.  If you all tell me that it is not required and to change it,
> great.  If not, also great.
> 
> While we are looking at this, though, I think we need to look at meta
> and link.  Again, in migrating from XHTML M12N 2, I have changed the
> content model of they are available in the body and so that link has a
> content model of (link | meta)* and meta has a content model of (PCDATA
> | Inline)*.  This is clearly a change from XHTML 1.1.
> 
> [1]  http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Drafts/xhtml-rdfa
> 
> Ivan Herman wrote:
>> +1 with all your arguments!
>>
>> Ivan
>>
>> Ben Adida wrote:
>>  
>>> (Chair hat off)
>>>
>>> Mark Birbeck wrote:
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>>    
>>>> My point about starting with a 'mental model' is only to suggest that
>>>> we look at how something fits with existing HTML, and existing
>>>> practice. The idea was simply that if we're happy with the model we
>>>> can look at how we explain it to other people. (It's actually how
>>>> nearly everything in RDFa has been designed, just not always
>>>> explicitly.)
>>>>       
>>> So, I'm not happy with the model of adding HREF everywhere in something
>>> called XHTML1.1+RDFa. Mark, you've always pointed out that RDFa is
>>> primarily aimed at HTML authors adding semantic markup. I mostly agree
>>> with you. With that assumption, I can only imagine an HTML author being
>>> thoroughly confused by HREF everywhere, wondering, "where's the
>>> clickable link? How do I *make* it clickable?". Why would an HTML author
>>> do this? What is the use case that would lead him to put an HREF on a
>>> DIV as far as the HTML author is concerned? This adds a whole level of
>>> inherently invisible metadata, where the primary goal of RDFa is to mark
>>> up visible data.
>>>
>>> Regarding acceptability of this approach, I'm in full agreement with
>>> Ivan on this: the backlash against this will be enormous. We *have* to
>>> plan for it, and, more importantly, we have to ask ourselves: what is
>>> the cost/benefit of this quasi-ensured backlash? I see a high cost, and
>>> I don't see the benefit wrt our goals.
>>>
>>> Finally, the biggest worry I have is regarding the perception of this
>>> change. If we add HREF in a bunch of places, we're really changing the
>>> document model for HTML in ways that even adding REL didn't do (since
>>> that is still about marking up visible content). It's not XHTML1.1
>>> anymore. It's clearly XHTML1.2. And the perception will be that we're
>>> trying to squeeze XHTML2 features into XHTML1 via RDFa. That is a
>>> dangerous proposition: we should not make RDFa an even bigger lightning
>>> bolt for criticism, if we can help it.
>>>
>>> -Ben
>>>     
>>
>>   
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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