- From: Ben Adida <ben@adida.net>
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:36:12 -0700
- To: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- CC: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com, Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>, www-tag@w3.org
I think it's worth noting that this is RDFa in XHTML1.1, and that we *have* (or at least have resolved to and will very soon) update the XHTML namespace document to reflect how RDFa can and should be interpreted. I believe that is the "missing link" in the reasoning, but please let me know if I'm incorrect. I wanted to make sure this point was made before Noah has to publish the TAG finding. -Ben Mark Baker wrote: > Noah, > > On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 5:52 PM, <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com> wrote: >> * You then quote the RDFa Syntax and Processing draft: "There SHOULD be a >> @version attribute on the html element with the value 'XHTML+RDFa 1.0;". >> Let's for the moment ignore that it's a SHOULD and consider the case where >> @version is indeed set this way. Is there something in RFC 3236 or XHTML >> 1.0 to the effect that "a value in the @version attribute of the HTML >> element is a key that can be used to identify additional specification(s) >> that provide normative interpretations for markup beyond that which is >> standardized for XHTML itself?" As best I can tell, XHTML delegates >> discussion of the <HTML> element to HTML 4.01, and that in turn says that >> the version attribute is deprecated! [1] Is there something normative in >> either XHTML or M12N that says "go looking for a specification that seems >> to have been written by the authority responsible for the namespace used >> in the new markup?". >> >> So, I'm still missing some crucial connections.= > > I think there is one connection missing; RDFa extends the meaning of > rel (and rev) attribute values in a manner which HTML doesn't licence. > > Often, IME, doing that sort of thing is a really bad idea, but not > always. In this case, rel attribute values are a fairly simple > element of HTML, as they're just a list of opaque strings from a small > dictionary, and AFAIK, there's no processors which try to treat them > as anything more than that. So RDFa's introduction of special meaning > to a colon - a character unused in that dictionary - is effectively > harmless. > > That's not the end of the story of course, because while RDFa isn't > self-descriptive, it should be made so. What that requires is an > update to HTML to anoint the special meaning of ":" in link types; > > http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#linkTypes > > So for your draft, you might consider expanding 4.1 to explain in more > detail what it means to extend an existing media type > self-descriptively in both the short and long term. > > Mark.
Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 06:37:00 UTC