Re: The Vocabulary, Schema.org governance, etc.

On 23 September 2014 11:15, Renato Iannella <ri@semanticidentity.com> wrote:

> "The Sponsors reserve the right, at any time, with or without notice to you,
> to make changes to the Schema, including, without limitation, to make
> changes that result in your existing Schema content becoming non-compliant with the revised Schema. "

This rather comes with the territory, in that all of RDFa (Lite/1.1),
Microdata, JSON-LD and HTML itself have been evolving under our
collective feet over these last few years. Those underlying formats
have a much stronger sense of "compliance" than schema.org itself. But
it also is rather inevitable in any schema on this scale, as various
pieces have been gently tweaked to fit together more consistently.

I wish we'd included a Pirates of the Carribbean quote in legalistic
all-caps. From http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0001222/quotes -

'AND THIRDLY, THE CODE IS MORE WHAT YOU'D CALL "GUIDELINES" THAN
ACTUAL RULES...'

I believe actions speak louder than words here, and that the archives
of this list demonstrate the project's ongoing concern for the
delicate balance between usability improvements, evolution and
extensions vs backwards-compatibility and respect for existing
deployments. Beyond this we are looking into mechanisms (discussions
are in github) for citing a date-stamped frozen version of each
release, so that publishers who want to declare their use of a
specific version will have a means of doing so. This should also help
other initiatives who want to document a relationship to a specified
version of a (potentially evolving) definition.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2014 10:37:29 UTC