status of RDFa in W3C Recommendations

Re:

  ACTION: Ralph to report on use of RDFa metadata in Recommendations.
  [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2008/11/18-swd-minutes.html#action02]

Currently the W3C Webmaster is permitted to publish Technical
Reports [1] other than Recommendations using RDFa markup.  This
means Working Drafts, Candidate Recommendations, Proposed
Recommendations, and Group Notes.  This is enforced by W3C
publication requirements ("pubrules") [2].

The rationale for not excluding Recommendations at this time is
that W3C strongly prefers that Recommendation documents be
stable for a long period of time after publication.  Should there
be any ill effects from the inclusion of RDFa in a TR we would
prefer not to have to republish a Recommendation. We therefore
have taken a conservative approach to documents that enter
that state of maturity.

A few weeks ago I raised this again wiht Ian Jacobs, our Head
of Communications, who is responsible for maintaining the
W3C publication requirements.  While neither of us have in
mind at this time a specific set of milestones to judge the
impact of permitting RDFa in Rec TRs, we both acknowledge
that at the moment we have insufficient deployment
experience to properly consider the question.

So, for now, W3C Recommendations are required to

  "validate as either HTML 4.x or as some version of XHTML
  that is a W3C Recommendation" [3]

which class does not include XHTML+RDFa.

(Member Submissions are not considered to be TRs but do fall
under the pubrules requirements.  As the submitters may also
update these documents, my understanding is that there would
be no restriction on using RDFa in a Member Submission.)

  [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/
  [2] http://www.w3.org/2005/07/pubrules
  [3] <http://www.w3.org/2005/07/pubrules?uimode=filter&uri=>

Received on Tuesday, 6 January 2009 14:54:36 UTC