Re: A proposal for establishing an RDFa IG

Shane McCarron wrote:
> 
> Sam Ruby wrote:
>>
>> Ben will confirm then when we met in March, I suggested that the best 
>> course of action was to simply produce a "RDFa in HTML" document, and 
>> that I have taken every opportunity I can find to reinforce that 
>> notion.  In the ASF, you will often hear the term JFDI in situations 
>> like these.  If you are nof familiar with that term, I'll leave it up 
>> to your imagination what the letters stand for.
 >
> All this aside, you will note that Ben conveyed your request to the 
> group, and I and others produced a draft of such a document.  However, 
> at the time, we were told and believed that we could not produce such a 
> document under the auspices of the W3C because we are not chartered to 
> do so (the existing task force is under the SemWeb and XHTML 2 
> Activities).  That's why the document is in "ApTest" space [1] today.  
> The document is being worked on, it has tests, it has implementations, 
> it will have an implementation report, etc.  We have received comments, 
> we have an issue repository [2], and we are working through those issues.

Re: "we were told"... if you can tell me who told you that, I will 
follow up... and resolve the issue.

> I would be pleased to release copyright on this document to the W3C once 
> someone in management there tells me there is a home for it.  Until 
> then, ApTest is more than willing to support the activity.  Basically, 
> and I am sure you agree with me here Sam, I refuse to let bureaucracy 
> get in the way of progress.

Do I qualify as "in management"?  If so, I am saying that if you join 
the HTML Working Group and request access to CVS, Mike Smith will work 
with you to make it happen (details including ssh keys and copyright).

If you need something more than that, let me know, and I will flatten 
those issues too.

I honestly don't believe that there is a charter issue here.  Ian, for 
example, clearly believes that the /use cases/ which support RDFa are in 
scope, he just happens to believe that he has come up with a "superior" 
design for addressing those use cases.  I happen to believe that common 
failing of a standards bodies (and not just the W3C, though it clearly 
has happened here) is to produce a lot of "superior" designs and in the 
process lost sight of their constituencies and therefore have not gotten 
widely deployed.

I for one would rather that the HTML WG produce something worthy of 
loving parody by Clay Shirky[3].

- Sam Ruby

> [1] http://www.aptest.com/standards/rdfa-html
> [2] http://rdfa.info/wiki/Rdfa-in-html-issues

[3] http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html

Received on Friday, 10 July 2009 13:37:34 UTC