[whatwg] microformats incompatible with WebApps 1.0 ?

[Robert Sayre]

On 12/11/06, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>
> With the new proposal, the above still works, but doesn't require the
> profile attribute.

I've gone back and forth on this one. The idea that one can take short
names and "ground them in URI space" by doing profile= or xmlns= or
whatever is a siren song. It does seem to solve squatting and naming
clashes... but those pesky authors tend to ruin it. It's almost like
they have better things to do that worry about rigorous markup
generation systems.

Perhaps it's cheaper to make up your own root element and MIME type. I
can't think of many complaints concerning clashes of <title> elements
in documents with no namespaces.

Claiming that HTML5 must qualify class names with the profile
attribute makes it seem like we're at an impasse. We're not. I don't
see any evidence that the profile attribute is more necessary in HTML5
than it is in HTML4 or HTML6. Besides, it's so dependent on the idea
of a single source document that it will never survive tranlation to
fragments in syndication feeds, livejournals, and myspace pages.

-- 

Robert Sayre