Re: microformats, profiles, and taking back rel/class names [standardizedFieldValues-51]

On 7/18/07, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org> wrote:
>
> Mark Baker wrote:
> > Taken to www-archive, as this response would just be repeating what
> > I've already said on www-tag.
> That's fine, and thanks for talking this through.
>
> [snip]
> >>
> >> In that regard, why not make @class do the "Right Thing" instead of
> >> inventing @class2?
> >
> > Because of the backwards compatibility reasons I've given, and the
> > problems it would create for already deployed software.
> But, if no one is using @profile in combination with class since it's
> undefined, why not define it as something like namespacing the class
> element?

Like I say, because existing software doesn't know about this change.
If you did it, it could be nothing more than a "provisional namespace"
in the sense that some agents will recognize it and some won't; what I
was showing with the "employee" example.

> Or, for that matter, div and span elements? Especially as that
> would be compatible with mixing and matching current microformats?

I don't think it would be compatible.  Consider;

<div class="vcard" profile="http://www.microformats.org/" > ...

and

<div class="vcard" profile="http://example.org/some/other/url/" >

"vcard" has global scope.  Trying to fix

> I'm not the only one whose thinking this way - Ryan King from Technorati
> had this conversation with me where we thought this might be a sensible
> way to address the @profile/head issue.

Tantek had this XMDP thing that was supposed to address the
extensibility issue (using @profile), but that was never adopted.  As
a result, "vcard" is now a global name because there's quite a bit of
software out there that keys *only* off 'class="vcard"' without
looking at @profile (which was recognized by the WHAT WG in HTML 5).
We can't recall all that software, so we're stuck with that
interpretation of @class.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.         http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies  http://www.coactus.com

Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2007 20:23:20 UTC