- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 14:47:44 +0100
- To: Sebastian Heath <sebastian.heath@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-rdfa-wg@w3.org
Hi Sebastian,
> Empty values can be useful so I'd prefer to stick to the current behavior.
>
> If the resource being described doesn't have a particular property, it
> shouldn't be specified. That's different from saying a property has a
> value of the empty string.
>
> Obviously, I'm not saying anything new here. Just hoping to retain
> flexibility in the syntax and processing model.
That's true. But a few months ago on a different issue, Toby drew
attention to the fact that whitespace rules for elements are different
to those for attributes. This is related because it makes me wonder
whether you can guarantee to consistently get an empty string when
using empty elements.
I'd be interested to hear what Toby thinks on this, but it would seem
that if you really *must* have an empty string then you should do
this:
<span property="p1" content=""></span>
That will then cope with any of the following:
<span property="p1" content="">
</span>
<pre property="p1" content="">
</pre>
<span property="p1" content=""><!--
nothing to see here
--></span>
<span property="p1" content=""><[CDATA[
]]></span>
and so on.
None of which is to say I'm for or against Richard's proposal; I'm
just saying that your use-case might have a different solution anyway,
which is unrelated to Richard's proposal.
Regards,
Mark
--
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane
mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com
http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck
webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
London, EC2A 4RR)
Received on Thursday, 5 August 2010 13:48:46 UTC