[whatwg] foreign attributes Re: several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Elias Torres wrote:
> 
> I work at IBM/Lotus and are in the process of shipping a series of 
> internal components used by IBM employees as Lotus products. We have 
> tried using microformats as an extension mechanism for HTML but found 
> several limitations that make us look onto other things for 
> extensibility. We are hoping HTML5 will address some of the needs we 
> find to be extremely important in order for us to include structured 
> information in HTML.
>
> One of the first problems we have with microformats is that even with 
> small structures like vCards, maintaining uf parsing code is not as 
> straightforward as writing the implementing the simple cases. Many have 
> tried to create extensibility mechanism for customers to submit new 
> microformats, but have ended up with solutions that require JS code to 
> be submitted in order to properly parse any number of customer-defined 
> microformats. Microformat work very well on clearly specified cases, but 
> do breakdown (in my opinion) when everyone wants their own microformat.
> 
> I'm currently participating in the RDFa task force but IBM would rather
> not have to wait for XHTML2 to have a valid/official solution to this
> problem.

I don't really understand what the problem you are describing is... could 
you provide some examples? (In particular, it's not clear to me why RDFa 
would be easier to handle than HTML class attributes.)

Implementation experience such as yours is very useful, the more you can 
tell us about your experiences the better (especially concrete examples).

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'