ISSUE-1: Backward compatibility issues

"Are there backwards compatibility issues with the proposed path forward?"

As we get closer to nailing this RDFa Profiles proposal down, we must be
very sensitive to any backward compatibility issues that might crop up.

There is one backward compatibility issue that has been identified thus
far: What happens if by specifying a @profile in HTML+RDFa 1.1, the RDFa
processor removes all of the reserved keywords in RDFa 1.0. This is only
an issue if we decide to do the following when processing the @profile
attribute:

"When an RDFa processor processes a @profile element, it must ignore the
default RDFa profile mappings and use the mappings from the new profile
instead."

That decision, coupled with a decision to unify token/prefixes and
express the RDFa 1.0 reserved words in RDFa 1.1 as keywords/tokens would
mean that the following markup:

<head profile="http://example.com/grddlprofile">
...
<a rel="next" href="page2.html">next page</a>

would not generate any triples in XHTML+RDFa 1.1, when it would generate
a triple in XHTML+RDFa 1.0.

Additionally, we must be careful to identify backwards compatibility
issues by using a byte-for-byte identical document examples. The only
requirement is that we must generate all triples that an XHTML+RDFa 1.0
processor would generate.

Are there any other potential backwards-compatibility issues that we can
see at the moment?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarming Goes Open Source
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/02/01/bitmunk-payswarming/

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2010 18:44:59 UTC