[whatwg] [WA1] The profile Attribute

Sun Apr 17 06:11:56 PDT 2005

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> 
>>>Imagine you use publicly available profiles A and B.
>>>
>>>Two months later, the author of profile A updates his profile to 
>>>include the definition "baz", meaning something completely different 
>>>to the definition from profile B.
>>
>>Well, I'd say the author of profile A has broken some rules by not 
>>keeping the URI for an old version persistent.
> 
> 
> There is no way we are requiring a new URI every time the profile changes. 
> That would be an administrative nightmare for editors, authors, and UA 
> implementors. It would make working out common semantics nigh on 
> impossible. IMHO, anyway.
> 
> 
> 
>>>The only way I can see to avoid this is to use only one profile, since 
>>>then you can't ever get clashes.
>>
>>There are other ways I've seen proposed, such as using namespaces:
>>
>>http://www.protogenius.com/rel-schemas/draft-scheid-rel-schemas-00.htm
> 
> 
> Namespaces are not an option. Authors simply don't understand them.

Respectfully, I think namespaces are the only sensible solution here and 
in other situations where the document is mixing semantics from multiple 
sources. What's the evidence that authors don't understand namespaces? 
Does it all come from XML namespaces (which are more complex than 
anything we would need for this type of problem*)? In any case I think 
this is a situation where, with sensible defaults, we can provide a 
useful feature that will be well within the grasp of the small subset of 
authors who actually want to use it.

* For example we could define <profile name="foo" 
href="http://example.com/profiles/#foo" /> and then require a profile 
attribute for elements with rel values not assosiated with the default 
profile, which would be given by the value of the profile attribute in 
<head> or the last <profile> element with no <name> value. That seems 
much simpler than XML namespaces.

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