- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:09:01 +0200
- To: Ben Adida <ben@adida.net>
- Cc: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, RDFa mailing list <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
On Jan 26, 2009, at 03:55, Ben Adida wrote: > And *most* importantly: the time for finding compromise on issues of > personal taste has come and gone. In http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015913.html you said: "Though I do think you should consider RDFa attributes in HTML5, I didn't mean to start this thread just yet (we're in the middle of our transition to Proposed Rec at W3C for RDFa in XHTML 1.1)." When were you meaning to start that thread and how would your preferred thread starting time have related to the point in time after which the time for finding compromises would have been gone? Furthermore, I strongly disagree with the characterization of the over a decade-old text/html vs. XML DOM differences as an issue of personal taste. > The idea of specifically *not* allowing follow-your-nose flies in > the face of much of W3C's work If something turns out to be technically problematic on a large scale, the sunk cost of previous plans doesn't make it less technically problematic. Please note, however, that the context of my remarks about following your nose was that I thought dereferencing something similar to a fixed profile URI in order to discover short name to URI mappings in a microformat-ish speculative idea (not RDFa) would be bad for the same reason that mostly constant DTD URIs are bad. And people who publish XML documents are perfectly at liberty to change DTD URIs--just like people loading JS libraries from well-known CDNs are free to change script URIs. This is not so for URIs that also act as identifiers in addition to acting as follow-your-nose locators. > and the recent TAG publication on the self-describing web. I disagree with the TAG on some things. > High load on a W3C web server (due to poor implementations) is not > evidence enough to undo a major design principle of web architecture. I don't agree that 'follow your nose' is a major design principle of the architecture of the Web as the Web actually exists: None of the Web technologies that have been successfully deployed on the full scale of the Web embody the 'follow your nose' principle. For example, naming of HTML elements, naming of CSS properties, naming of HTTP headers, naming of Unicode characters and naming of DOM methods don't follow the 'follow your nose' principle. (Note that even if Namespaces in XML counts as successfully deployed, it specifically treats URIs as mere opaque strings and doesn't say that clients should follow their nose and dereference namespace URIs.) > The use case where someone copies and pastes partial HTML+RDFa from > someone's existing web site and gets upset doesn't ring true: the > same "problem" occurs in a much worse way with CSS, and no one seems > to be too upset about that. With CSS, it is super-easy to assess the immediate effect of including CSS and whether you value the effects CSS gives you. (However, the problem of being guided to do something with no obvious immediate benefit does occur with CSS when someone tells someone else to convert a site from presentational HTML attributes to class+CSS or to rename all classes to be more "semantic".) When someone instructs me to use e.g. CSS borders, even without any expertise, I can assess the practical effect of using CSS borders and whether the effect is worth the code complication to me. However, I have no way to tell if the source code maintenance complication of <span xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text " rel="dc:type">work</span> (copied and pasted from the creativecommons.org licensing tool) is actually useful for me in any way at all or if including it would just be participating in someone else's ritual. Interesting use of href and rel on a span, BTW. > Removing CURIEs is not an option at this point, If that's the case, I guess it's pointless for me to try to be proactive about coming up with a compromise. > given the existing standard, the existing deployment (by folks > including Yahoo), backwards-incompatibility, and the lack of > evidence for needing such a change at this point. > > If we were only a few months into designing RDFa with no > implementations or deployments, this discussion would make sense, Note that the difference in xmlns:foo DOM representation in text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml in *implementations* and *deployments* goes far further back in time than even the drafting of RDFa. > as would some attempt at finding a compromise based on personal taste. > > But at this point, one has to present significant evidence of harm > to undo what otherwise seems to be working just fine. > > -Ben > > PS: Note that I do agree on DOM consistency, and I suspect @prefix > will fix that issue, as Manu mentioned. I've mentioned this to Henri > in prior conversations, I believe. Is @prefix not an incompatible change to RDFa--especially if also applied to application/xhtml+xml for DOM Consistency? If that incompatible change is on the table, why would a more compatible approach of phasing out CURIEs by using xmlns:http="http:" in application/xhtml+xml during the transition be out of the question? -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 26 January 2009 14:09:47 UTC