Use cases not addressed by HTML5 Microdata (was: Re: A proposal for establishing an RDFa IG)

Ian Hickson wrote:
>>>> Therein lies the problem. We want to work on RDFa and address real 
>>>> use cases without being dependent on Ian.
>>> Which use cases does microdata not address?
>> The problems with microdata have been addressed before by others, I'm 
>> not going to spend the time going into them yet again.
> 
> I'm not aware of any use cases that microdata doesn't handle. There have 
> been issues raised, but none are use cases that aren't addressed. Since 
> you claimed the problem was to do with addressing "real use cases", if 
> there really are some, I would be very grateful if you could elaborate on 
> what they are.

Here are a couple of links to remind all of us about prior conversations
we've had related to microdata and not addressing certain technical
issues as well certain stated use cases.

Eduard: "microdata is even more restricted: it leaves out the cases that
RDFa leaves out, but it also leaves out some cases that RDFa was able to
handle."
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019749.html

Kristof: "Being unable to deal with all use cases sometimes is a
          feature."
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019807.html

Ian: "I couldn't find a good solution to this problem."
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019839.html

Ian: "Use cases for which I haven't been able to find solutions"
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019886.html

Hopefully, that will jog our collective memory.

> I [do not] think it's fair to cast the concerns that have been raised
> regarding RDFa as dubious, and nor am I aware of any serious effort to 
> actually fix all the problems

The concerns had been documented back in May 2009:

http://rdfa.info/wiki/rdfa-in-html-issues

and we are working to fix the issues:

http://rdfa.info/wiki/rdfa-in-html-issues#RDFa_Task_Force_Discussion_Order

> For example, I'm not aware of any plans to remove the 
> prefix mechanism from RDFa altogether or replace the URI-based identifier 
> mechanism with something more friendly.

We were working on RDFa Profiles (August 2008) before we became heavily
involved with HTML+RDFa. Ironically, addressing some of the HTML5
community's concerns has temporarily taken us away from the RDFa
Profiles work.

http://rdfa.info/wiki/RDFa_Profiles

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.1 Released - Browser-based P2P Commerce
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/06/29/browser-based-p2p-commerce/

Received on Thursday, 9 July 2009 08:47:51 UTC