Anne van Kesteren wrote:
On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:22:40 +0100, Shelley Powers
<shell...@burningbird.net> wrote:
My apologies for not responding sooner to this thread. You see, one
of the WhatWG working group members thought it would be fun to add a
comment to my Stop Justifying RDF and RDFa web post, which caused the
page to break. I am using XHTML at my site, because I want to
incorporate inline SVG, in addition to RDFa. An unfortunate
consequence of XHTML is its less than forgiving nature regarding
playful pranks such as this.
I'm assuming the WhatWG member thought the act was clever. It was,
indeed. Three people emailed me to let me know the post was breaking
while loading the page in a browser, and I made sure to note that
such breakage was courtesy of a WhatWG member, who decided that
perhaps I should just shut up, here and at my site, about the
Important Work people(?) here are doing.
Of course, the person only highlighted why it is so important that
something such as RDFa, and SVG, and MathML, get a home in HTML5.
XHTML is hard to support when you're allowing comments and external
input. Typically my filters will catch the accidental input of crappy
markup, but not the intentional. Not yet. I'm not an exerpt at
markup, but I know more than the average person. And the average
person most likely doesn't have my commitment, either.
http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/01/xml-sunday shows the commentor (who
by the way seems to be on your side in this debate) simply forgot to
escape <self-closed /> and then WordPress somehow messed up in an
attempt to fix it. I don't think anyone tries to make you "shut up".
(And if we, the evil WHATWG cabal, wanted to break your site, we
would've asked Philip` ;-))
You're not seeing all of the markup that caused problems, Anne. The
intention was to crash the post. However, I shouldn't have assumed that
the person who inserted the markup that caused the problems is a WhatWG
member. My apologies.
Regardless of intent, it does demonstrate, again, why it is important
for RDFa, SVG, and MathML find a home in HTML5. XHTML is a very
difficult markup to support when you're allowing outside input. The
tools do not do a good job of supporting XHTML, and hence the average
person finds such failures to be intimidating, and will immediately
return to HTML. Heck, I find the yellow screen of death to be unnerving
myself. It's only my interest in inline SVG and RDFa, and basically
distributed extensibility, that keeps me trying.
And regardless of the fact that I jumped to conclusions about WhatWG
membership, I do not believe I was inaccurate with the earlier part of
this email. Sam started a new thread in the discussion about the issues
of namespace and how, perhaps we could find a way to work the issues
through with RDFa. My god, I use RDFa in my pages, and they load fine
with any browser, including IE. I have to believe its incorporation into
HTML5 is not the daunting effort that others make it seem to be.'
However, the debate ended as soon as Ian re-asserted his authority.
Shelley
