[whatwg] microformats incompatible with WebApps 1.0 ?

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, James Graham wrote:
> 
> I am really quite concerned about the use of a global namespace to 
> associate classnames with semantics. This raises the possibility of 
> collisions between people who are expecting the class attribute to be an 
> opaque, semantic-free string, similar to the way that it was defined in 
> HTML 4, and those who are in the know about the existence of a global 
> registry and diligently register all the classnames that they use before 
> publishing anything.

I agree.


> I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is.

Me neither. Suggestions welcome.


> I think the situation would be considerably better if people were able 
> to register classname _prefixes_, so that people could use classnames of 
> the form microformatName_propertyName with microformatName registered. 
> This may require changes to the syntax of existing microformats for use 
> in HTML 5. I don't know if people would find that acceptable, but I 
> think the current proposal is, at least, unworkable.

The current proposal is a superset of this -- there's no reason that "the 
community" that eventually decides to gate the class names couldn't 
enforce such a policy. It doesn't actually change the spec.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'