[wbs] response to 'ISSUE-76 - Microdata - Straw Poll for Objections'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'ISSUE-76 -
Microdata - Straw Poll for Objections' (HTML Working Group) for Krzysztof
Maczynski.



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Objections to the Change Proposal to Split Microdata
----
We have a Change Proposal to Separate Microdata from the HTML5
Specification. If you have strong objections to adopting this Change
Proposal, please state your objections below.

Keep in mind, you must actually state an objection, not merely cite
someone else. If you feel that your objection has already been adequately
addressed by someone else, then it is not necessary to repeat it.
Rationale: 





---------------------------------
Objections to the Change Proposal to Keep Microdata
----
We have a Change Proposal to Keep Microdata in the HTML5 Specification. If
you have strong objections to adopting this Change Proposal, please state
your objections below.

Keep in mind, you must actually state an objection, not merely cite
someone else. If you feel that your objection has already been adequately
addressed by someone else, then it is not necessary to repeat it.
Rationale: 
Objection 1
Rec-track work on Microdata is not an option for this WG allowed by
charter.

Objection 2
The authors of Microdata claim that their design goal was to satisfy the
use cases given by the community interested in this kind of embedding
additional semantics. However, the community isn't satisfied with the
result and generally prefers the RDFa approach (including a clear path for
evolution, addressing issues by sincerely interested RDFa WG members,
integration with languages other than (X)HTML).

Objection 3
(This is also the problem underlying Objection 2.) Leaders of support for
Microdata have for a few years repeatedly stated their belief that the Web
should not accommodate a technology for solving the Semantic Web (or, as
some like it, semanic web) community's use cases. It woulde therefore be
naive to assume that they will continue to nourish that community and
evolve the spec to their liking (or indeed, that they already have so far),
much less that they'd welcome on-par involvement of experts from that
community or any meaningful form of dialogue.

Objection 4
Microdata is a political attempt at preventing RDFa from achieving more
success. This can be seen from Objection 3, unilateral faits accomplis, as
well as the Editor's employer's most likely purposeful misimplementation of
RDFa (see e.g. http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/05/googles-rdfa-a-damp-squib,
although it's easy to be picky at the points where the author's formulation
lacks some clarity), tormenting the market (since it's not just a partial
implementation - there are actually wrong triples extracted) and dumbing
RDFa down to the level of Microdata, making the advantages of the latter
(which it does have and they're informing RDFa 1.1) shine in comparison.

Answers to some objections to the other CP
(Those are based by some form of analogy on assumptions about things which
don't belong to the issue at hand, but these assumptions aren't universally
accepted, quite the opposite. This weakens their position by rendering
those arguments ungrounded.)

@Anne van Kesteren: Indeed, video, audio, canvas and img are inappropriate
in a markup language for hyperTEXT. object with specific bindings for
top-level media types associated in a UA's stylesheet would be the correct
generic approach, technically superior for all. See
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Sep/0739.html. Also see
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-forms-req#reqintro and please stop trying to
take us several years back.

@Henri Sivonen: Ian Hickson admits trying unsuccessfully to forestall
XForms. Work on Web Forms 2.0 was done outside W3C and later brought into
it by the political power of just a few companies against otherwise
accepted migration to a superior technology (XForms). XForms supporters
know they currently have to tolerate the development of the old forms
within HTML5. As one of them, I believe (and it seems to me that many would
agree) that in clean projects XForms will be used anyway with potential
dynamic translation to HTML5 forms where a user agent doesn't support it.
As you can see, the new features of the old forms aren't becoming popular
in actual documents. We already knew better in 1999, see
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xhtml-forms-req-19990830#req.


These answers were last modified on 17 December 2009 at 16:04:18 U.T.C.
by Krzysztof Maczynski

Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/issue-76-objection-poll/ until
2009-12-17.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Thursday, 17 December 2009 16:10:03 UTC