[whatwg] Spec should give guidance on compound document integration points

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 14:53:50 +0100, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:


> The obvious candidates for compound document mixing are SVG and
> MathML. Also, there are indications that people will want to embed
> RDF metadata in documents even though the syntax of RDF is designed
> for external metadata and isn't really all that good for embedded
> metadata. I think WA 1.0 should give some guidance on these matters.

One of the sources of complexity in RDF syntax is the requirement that it could be included in HTML documents in a way that didn't upset legacy browsers. There are assorted use cases for being able to include RDF inside documents.

[assorted reasonable suggestions]

> Where should the RDF element from the RDF namespace be allowed in an
> XHTML5 host document? (My expectation: It should be allowed as a
> child of the head element. Other metadata goes there and the contents
> of head are hidden in legacy browsers, so the text node descendants
> of the RDF element from the RDF namespace won't leak to presentation
> in legacy browsers. Also, if conformance checkers don't have a hole
> that allows embedded RDF, people who want to embed RDF will come up
> with worse workarounds to avoid eliciting errors in conformance
> checking.

Indeed...

> To work around the fact that RDF envelope is designed for
> external metadata and not embedded metadata, XHTML5 should probably
> suggest that authors use rdf:about="" to refer to the current
> document as per XMP*.)

This is standard RDF practice already actually (and fairly common). There are a few edge cases where the semantic power of RDF means that this should not be done, but they probably don't need to be discussed in WHATWG documents as they are unlikely to arise in the usage of people who are reading those documents instead of learning about RDF.

cheers

Chaals

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  Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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Received on Sunday, 25 February 2007 05:20:48 UTC