Chris Messina wrote:
This was one of most ill-conceived ideas I can imagine. Leaving class
values unfettered by the HTML spec is hugely important.
I imagine that the original concept is something of a hat tip to
microformats -- but avoids the process that we use as well as
circumvents the peer review of this community. It also seems dictated
by fiat as opposed to open discussion (but that's a minor point).
Predefined class names have been dropped, but without @profile (or
something like it), class names are still effectively predefined by
whoever is shouting the loudest. We don't need class names decided by
democracy or autocracy. We just need a standard mechanism that lets
people solve their own (meta)data-in-html problems and tell user-agents
how they are doing it without getting in anyone else's way. @profile is
the closest we've got to that, and maybe it could be improved upon, but
it would be hugely limiting to the progress of semantic html to drop it
altogether.
The reasoning for dropping @profile, as far as I can gather, is that,
in practice microformats, seem to work fine without it. That may be
true (for the moment at least), but what about semantic html formats
that aren't Microformats? Microformats 'work fine' without @profile
because they:
1) cover a relatively small range of attribute values
2) use deliberately obscure classnames
3) have raised a lot of awareness that these obscure classnames have a
special meaning
Clearly there are lots of people and organisations who would like to
solve problems by using semantic html, but for whom the Microformats
approach to ensuring unambiguity is not a practical option.
Just dropping the functionality of @profile from HTML5 altogether means:
* You can't use GRDDL with HTML5
* No standard way of letting consumers discover semantics behind html
conventions by "following their nose" from HTML source to profile document
* It's harder to experiment with new formats and evolve existing ones -
say you wanted to base your own format on an existing one, there is no
way to tell a parser that this isn't eRDF, but a mutant breed of eRDF
and hCard. And consequently, less innovation will take place in the
semantic html space.
Conversely, if HTML5 keeps this functionality, and perhaps even tries to
improve it, and if its use is well explained, I think it could go
from being a relatively obscure attribute, to being a fairly important
feature of semantic html. Microformats, after all, has raised a lot of
interest in using HTML for encoding data semantically, but its not an
approach that solves every problem. @profile can let people solve
problems for themselves .
Cheers,
Keith
--
Keith Alexander
http://semwebdev.keithalexander.co.uk/blog/
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