Re: HTML 4 Profile for RDFa

Sam Ruby On 09-05-14 20.01:
> Shane McCarron wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> Thanks to you all for encouraging me to create a draft profile for 
>> RDFa in HTML 4.  This document has no official standing of course - 
>> it is just something we at ApTest have been using for a while as a 
>> way of pushing metadata into traditional web sites and user agents.
>>
>> You can find the latest version at 
>> http://www3.aptest.com/standards/rdfa-html/
>>
>> Feel free to send comments to me directly or to the 
>> public-rdfa@w3.org list if you want to share them with the 
>> community.  I look forward to seeing what you think!
>
> A promising start!

And a powerful demonstration of the usefulness of DTDs, @profile and 
profiles. Also known as modularization. Or "the hubris of 1998", as some 
call it [1]. ;-)

Slowly, I have gathered that, from authors' point of view, profiles and 
DTDs /lead/ - they are far from as pointless as is often claimed in this 
WG (because the focus is so narrowly on UAs). For example, earlier this 
year Steve wanted to validate ARIA in HTML 4, and he had to turn to a 
off-line DTD [2] (that has since also found its way into an authoring 
tool [3]).  The "HTML 4.0.1 plus" experiment [4] is also DTD based and 
can therefore be validated as well. As can "HTML 4+RDFa" documents. And 
these many, new HTML 4.0.1. dialects hints that DTDs, profiles and 
modularisation are quite helpful as a framework for specification 
writers as well. (Will HTML 5 completely eliminate the need for 
"private" HTML specs? If not, how should one go about if one needed to 
validate something - such as ARIA - that is (currently) officially 
unsupported in HTML 5?)

Perhaps the XHTML 2 working group should concentrate on updating HTML 
401 with support for ARIA, RDFa etc? After all, HTML 4 is their 
responsibility.  From the reactions to this RDFa in HTML 4 draft, it 
seems like updating HTML 4.0.1 would be one of the best things that the 
XHTML 2 WG could do in order to help the HTML 5 development in the right 
direction.

[1] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2009/05/14/RDFa-in-HTML
[2] http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=107
[3] http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=108
[4] http://buzzword.org.uk/2008/html4plus-example
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Friday, 15 May 2009 01:10:29 UTC