Re: @profile is wrong solution for indicating that RDFa is present

There is a very practical aspect of @profile that we should not
underestimate. Combined with the xslt script of, eg, Fabien, RDFa's
deployment can ride on the back of GRDDL. And I think that is good and
important.

Ie, I think keeping @profile is a good idea.

Ivan

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> 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>
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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