Re: RDFa in HTML 4

olivier Thereaux wrote:
>
> Do I sense the presence of a chicken-egg issue? The HTML4 spec was not 
> made to allow RDFa, and so its authoritative schemas don't either.
>
> Could the HTML4 spec be amended to allow the usage of RDFa? 
> Technically yes, although it would be a bit of a mess, with the 
> existing efforts on HTML5 and XHTMLx.x. If HTML4.01 gets back into the 
> REC track, web developers may be even more confused than they are 
> already.
I think that you have misunderstood the basic thread here (or we never 
said it out loud).  No one is proposing updating HTML 4 - that would be 
a nightmare.

What some of us have been discussing OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF THE RDFa TASK 
FORCE is whether it would be possible to define a profile of RDFa that 
was usable in HTML documents.  This would be a separate document type, 
based upon HTML 4.01.  It would have its own FPI, and people could use 
it to validate if they wanted.  The reason the issue of the validator 
came up at all is that XHTML+RDFa relies upon the XML Namespaces 
specification and "xmlns:*" attributes.  There is a hack in the 
validator now to stop it warning about use of those attributes in XML 
dialects, and we discussed whether a similar hack would work in an SGML 
context.  My conclusion about that was that it could be hacked, but it 
wouldn't help because attribute names with colons in them are not 
permitted in SGML and therefore (probably) not permitted in the DOM and 
some parsers could barf were we to try to shoehorn "xmlns:foaf=whatever" 
into HTML 4 + RDFa.

Anyway, I think the upshot is that there are no validator consequences 
at all right now, and I personally don't envision any.

-- 
Shane P. McCarron                          Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
Managing Director                            Fax: +1 763 786-8180
ApTest Minnesota                            Inet: shane@aptest.com

Received on Friday, 18 July 2008 16:23:23 UTC