Re: [LC] Official SVG Tiny Working Draft Comments from W3C RDF in XHTML Task Force (ISSUE-2099)

Doug,

just a very small comment but, in my view, of a certain importance...

Doug Schepers wrote:
[snip]
> At the same time, we are reluctant to add a normative dependency on RDFa
> (despite that specification's maturity) because we cannot rely upon
> there being multiple interoperable SVG User Agents that currently
> implement the RDFa processing rules.  We hope this will change, spurred
> on by our inclusion of these attributes.

It is not clear to me that the RDFa (or microformat) content should be
(necessarily) understood by SVG User Agents. The beauty of RDFa and
microformats is that the same file can be used for different purposes;
one for display and the other for metadata management, data integration,
you-name-it. The only thing an average SVG User Agent has to do is to
_ignore_ the microformat/RDFa specific attributes which, I believe,
would be the case anyway. This is analogous to the fact that a
traditional web browser would just ignore the RDFa attributes in an
XHTML page and would display the content unchanged.

I guess one essential part of the discussion here is that, if carefully
done, then most (if not all) current RDFa implementation would just
interpret the SVG+RDFa content out of the box and without any change.
Indeed, they usually do not check the XHTML DTD, and may not really make
use of specificities of HTML. Ie, by avoiding special SVG cases you
actually get the CR criteria fulfilled (in this respect) almost free of
charge:-) (B.t.w., when the time comes, I am happy to work with you and
test such SVG files using my python distiller. I hope it would work
without change; if it does not, I would consider it more my bug than
yours:-)

Cheers

Ivan

-- 

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