@profile is wrong solution for indicating that RDFa is present

Hello all,

During the course of writing a blog post [1] in response to one from
Danny Ayers [2], I realised that the use of @profile to indicate the
presence of RDFa is not really in keeping with the spirit of the
attribute in HTML.

Although not clearly defined, @profile is generally used to provide
information to a user agent about how it might interpret values in
<meta> and <link>. This is used to good effect in microformats and
GRDDL, and both uses of @profile are well within the spirit of how
@profile is defined in HTML.

But RDFa already has a way to disambiguate values, based on the use of
CURIEs and prefix mappings. At the moment we don't use @profile to
indicate taxonomies, but @xmlns. What we do instead is provide a fixed
value for @profile that is supposed to indicate the presence of RDFa,
but that is not providing a 'profile' in the usual sense--a set of
terms that help with interpretation--but is simply using @profile to
set a 'boolean' flag to true.

I feel this overloads @profile in a way that might confuse people
("where is the RDFa taxonomy defined by this profile?"), and would
suggest we look for an alternative means of setting this 'flag'. There
are many ways we could do this, but for now I wanted to just flag this
up as an issue.

Regards,

Mark

[1] <http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/2007/12/rdfa-profile-and-following-your-nose.html>

[2] <http://dannyayers.com/2007/12/08/another-little-abstraction>

-- 
  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

  mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
  http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

  standards. innovation.

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 15:17:22 UTC