Re: HTML+RDFa Heartbeat Draft publishing request

Hi Larry,

On Jan 14, 2010, at 8:38 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:

> I think where this discussion is leading me is:
>
> HTML has several different extension mechanisms.
> Some traditional extensibility mechanisms (DOCTYPE version
> extensions & DTDs, head/@profile with meta) have been
> removed.
>
> Some new ones have been proposed and added
> (microdata) or added under protest (RDFa).
>
> Some other ones are being dealt with a mysterious
> "other specification" mechanism which isn't really
> a mechanism since it isn't really defined.
> (SVG and MathML).
>
> Some other namespace-like things are being discussed
> but haven't been settled.
>
> One of the proposals shows how to add RDFa but
> nothing else, there's a proposal for how to add Ruby
> which we haven't talked about much. I don't remember
> any discussions on how to add ITS.
>
> No one has talked much about how to unify these
> extensibility mechanisms or enable a transition of
> one to the other.
>
> I think if we were going to take the charter seriously,
> we'd do more work on convergence.
>
> Is that a fair summary? Would you change it somehow?

I think that in broad terms you are correct that we should consider  
extension mechanisms more generally, and see if any broadly powerful  
ones need to be added. I believe that is covered under ISSUE-41  
decentralized-extensibility, where we have had much discussion and  
soon will need to convert our thinking into concrete proposals.

I'm not sure I agree entirely with all of your specific comments, but  
I'm thinking I will save that commentary for the ISSUE-41 discussion.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 14 January 2010 16:47:07 UTC