Re: PROPOSAL from telecon on XMLLiteral

Ben,

On 29 Jul 2009, at 22:36, Ben Adida wrote:
> I'm apprehensive about changes to existing specs, too, which is why  
> I've
> tried to take this one slowly, making sure we're taking into account
> what implementors are actually doing.
>
> I've checked with both the Yahoo and Google teams, and it seems fairly
> clear that they would much prefer RDFa to function this way. In  
> fact, I
> think at least one of their parsers will force plain literals no  
> matter
> what :)
>
> Also, just to be extra clear, the *only* markup whose interpretation
> would change, according to the spec, is when XML content is marked  
> with
> @property but not @datatype.
>
> So, my thinking at this point is that this change may simply represent
> the reality of implementations out there. That's why I'm not sure a  
> true
> versioning is needed.


Looking at the implementation report [1], specifically Test0011, it  
appears that seven of the nine implementations listed handle  
XMLLiteral with conformance to the current rules. I can tell you that  
rdfQuery is also conformant to RDFa 1.0 as currently specified.

So it's not exactly "the reality of implementations out there".

I do, of course, understand that Yahoo and Google implementations are  
more important than any others, and that given their marketplace  
dominance they are unlikely to change something they don't want to  
change, whereas the developers of the smaller implementations are  
likely to adapt to a moving specification. Pragmatically, it may be  
the right thing to do.

I just think it's a weird "standard" that changes because of a few non- 
conformant implementations.

Jeni

[1]: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/implementation-report/
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Thursday, 30 July 2009 17:23:02 UTC