Re: Publishing a new draft (HTML5+RDFa)

Ian Hickson wrote:
> By "technical problems" I mean problems with the design, as opposed to 
> editorial problems. They're primarily usability issues, which are to some 
> extent subjective. I make no apology for having an opinion on what makes a 
> usable language; it's my job to have such an opinion.

Of course you have an opinion, we all do.

But it's time to stop couching your personal opinion as objective
"technical problems." If RDFa were impossible to parse in today's
browsers with today's JavaScript, that would be an objective technical
problem. If no one could get RDFa markup right, that would be an
objective technical problem. Clearly, the evidence shows that people are
marking up pages with RDFa just fine, and people are parsing RDFa just fine.

There are definitely some edge cases with RDFa in HTML that we want to
address. We want to do it in the spirit of consensus, working with HTML5
experts in this group.

In other words, the *only reason* that micro-data is in the HTML5 spec
and not RDFa is because of your personal preference. And in this case,
it's even more singular than other aspects of HTML5, because you came up
with micro-data on your own, on a whim, and added it to the spec before
any meaningful review by anyone.

But this is a W3C working group. It should function on consensus. One
person's opinion does not a spec make, even when that person is someone
like you, Ian, who's contributed an incredible amount of work to the
HTML effort.

If you won't agree to consensus for "your" version of the spec, then the
WG must allow other versions to be published in parallel, so that
consensus might emerge from competing views.

I don't think any of the three HTML5 specs are "finished." I believe
that all three should be published for the heartbeat requirement.

-Ben

Received on Friday, 31 July 2009 16:18:41 UTC