Re: RDFa and Web Directions North 2009

Hi Sam,

> Ah, at last, a technical discussion!

He he.

But with respect, to have a discussion we need to read each other's comments. :)

I wrote that the result of defining the specification in terms of
navigating a DOM rather than in terms of a specific set of angle
brackets was that:

  "...there are already a number of parsers available that run within
  current browsers, even when the host browser is in HTML mode."

Yet you replied:

> Sounds great in theory.

I won't dispute that it sounds great in theory, but the reason I
mentioned that we have existing browser implementations is to make the
point that it *already* works...

...in practice!


Anyway, you then continue:

> Unfortunately, Henri has provided a test case that disproves this in practice:
>
> http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-January/018242.html

I don't know quite what it is that you think Henry has 'disproved'. We
already knew that the there are additional properties relating to
namespaces that are available in XHTML mode, but that are not
available in HTML mode.

Henri gives us a script that when run in HTML mode, doesn't get to use
those properties...but why is that a surprise?

In short, if you want to write an RDFa parser in JavaScript, that will
run in both HTML mode and XHTML mode, you'll need to process the
attribute names yourself, and keep track of the prefix mappings.

It's not particularly difficult.

Regards,

Mark

-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
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Received on Friday, 13 February 2009 20:03:00 UTC