[whatwg] Ghosts from the past and the semantic Web

[Russell Leggett]

I actually think that using custom microformat-like conventions with classes
or tags is really not as robust a solution as what is being attempted with
RDFa (I honestly did not know much about RDFa before this conversation).
However, while people keep suggesting classes, I have yet to hear anyone
suggest the data- attributes. Maybe it was said or implied elsewhere, but it
seems like a good fit here. Instead of requiring the addition of "about" or
"property" attributes, just use "data-about" or "data-property". It may not
be ideal, but it fits with the existing spec.
Beyond that, you have the issue of CURIEs. I can see how they make a good
fit, but it really is just piggybacking on  something else convenient. It's
an abuse of namespace syntax. That works fine for XHTML, but there is no way
you are getting namespaces put into HTML, so figure out another way. Why not
something like "data-curie="dc:http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"? It may not
be as easily accessible to the parser as a namespace prefix, but remember
that this is seriously all convention anyway. At least this convention has
less interference, and gets closer to what you want.

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 5:32 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:

> On Aug 28, 2008, at 05:59, Ben Adida wrote:
>
>  Same goes with MySpace widgets. Paste one thing, get the widget. Who's
>> going to go paste two things in two different places? It's really
>> important to make HTML the carrier of this information.
>>
>
>
> It seems to me that this line of reasoning should lead to using identifiers
> that are contained in one string instead of splitting identifiers and
> putting the pieces in two places like CURIEs do.
>
> (In fact, the declaration part of CURIE syntax has already been forgotten
> in examples sent to this mailing list.)
>
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen at iki.fi
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>
>
>
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