Mark Nottingham wrote:
Yes, absolutely; users will cherry-pick features from different versions
of HTML to suit their desires, and plant them into whatever version of
the format they like / their CMS supports / is the latest fashion.
They'll expect browsers to seamlessly handle this.
This only underlines the importance making the syntax and disambiguation
of @rel compatible among the different versions of HTML; that would
serve these users well. Using a different version attribute is not an
excuse to throw backwards compatibility out of the window, and it's not
like RDFa is an old specification, so ignorance of the issues
surrounding versioning and compatibility can't be claimed.
It certainly doesn't justify putting the subset of users who want to do
the right thing and have valid, unambiguous markup into a place where
they can't, because the features they need are spread out among those
incompatible versions of HTML. Not every consumer of HTML is a browser.
+1
Users who are attracted to RDFa today are likely to have been
influenced either directly or indirectly by Zeldman and his brethren.
They include an XHTML DOCTYPE and try to be careful about quotes. The
few that actually read specs will see that XHTML 1.0 Transitional
allows the use of the text/html MIME type.
Sorry, RDFa just became mainstream, when the Creative Commons started
showing people how to use it by example. Speaking of attraction, I'm
very much reminded of the US legal concept of an attractive nuisance
here. Anyway...
+1
From where I'm sitting, RDFa should not have gone out the door as it
is, and because it did we have some damage to contain. Likely it's not
too bad, owing to the bad state of @rel in HTML anyway, but it has
effectively created one more thing to sniff in HTML -- "what rel
convention is in use here?" -- with all of the ambiguity and issues that
entails.
So, I have a fair idea of what I'm going to write in the next Link draft
now (see recent messages to Ben for a rough idea). What I really want to
know -- and this is why the TAG is still on the CC list here -- is
what's going to be done to prevent this from happening the next time.
Cheers,
P.S. Sam, I'm confused; you've brought up whitehouse.gov in this context
a few times, but AFAICT they don't serve RDFa on their front page. Yes,
they're serving XHTML with a text/html media type, but that's very wide
and understood practice. Please explain?
You are correct that it is not on their front page.
http://rdfa.info/2009/01/29/whitehousegov-uses-rdfa/ =>
http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/ =>
<a rel="cc:attributionURL" property="cc:attributionName"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"; href="http://www.whitehouse.gov";>
- Sam Ruby
