- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:45:53 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- Cc: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net>, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>, RDFa mailing list <public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Sam Ruby wrote: > Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > > > > It seems that some WG participants are uncomfortable with a perception > > of forks or branches, and I've suggested a way to proceed that would > > appear less forky. > > My observation is simply this: such a proposal would be more credible if > it were applied equally to micro-data and RDFa. The reason microdata is in HTML5 and RDFa is not is that RDFa has fundamental technical problems that make it unsuitable for use in text/html in general, and unsuitable as a solution for the user cases for which RDFa and microdata have been proposed as solutions in particular. For example, the use of prefixes, the exclusive use of URIs for identifiers, the use of rev="", the use of rel="" in a manner incompatible with the rest of HTML, the overly complicated processing model, the presence of features that aren't necessary (such as per-value data typing), and the ability to include multiple name-value pairs per element. I seriously considered using RDFa instead of creating a new technology when addressing the use cases that were put forward -- indeed I would much rather have used RDFa if I could have, since I don't particularly care about these use cases in the first place and the least I can do to address them the better. Unfortunately, I did not find RDFa suitable given the use cases and requirements with which I was faced. However, I have no objection to people forking HTML5 to include RDFa or creating a separate specification to define RDFa. To enable the former, the WHATWG spec is under a very flexible license (I am still hoping the W3C will one day see fit to allow W3C specs to use such a license), and to enable the latter, I have explicitly made HTML5 allow other specifications to extend the language. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 31 July 2009 04:46:36 UTC