[whatwg] [WA1] The profile Attribute

Lachlan Hunt lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au
Mon Apr 18 07:16:39 PDT 2005


James Graham wrote:
> Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> The problem with that method is that it doesn't allow values from 
>> multiple profiles to be included within the same element.
> 
> Is that an actual problem in practice?

It could be.  Say, for example, the Web Communication Link Relationships 
[1] I've proposed earlier for link relationships were defined in a 
profile, it could be quite probable that such values may be used in 
conjunction with some from XFN.

eg.
<p><a href="..." rel="wclr.user xfn.met">John Smith</a> said:</p>
<p>comment...</p>

> Having namespaces only where conflicts occur strikes me as unwise - in 
> general the author is unlikely to know what the complete range of values 
> in a given spec is and it makes documents very fragile to addition of 
> data from new profiles and to addition of values to existing profiles. 

That same argument also applies where there are no namespaces at all, 
however introducing optional namespaces may also address the concerns 
against namespaces.

> It also makes view-source style learning hard because...

View-source learning is already hard because most documents on the web 
are non-conformant and invalid rubbish.  But I don't agree it would make 
it harder since most of the time the namespace prefixes would be 
required, only for the odd case where naming conflicts do occur within 
profiles used by the same document.

[1] http://lachy.id.au/dev/markup/specs/wclr/

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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