[whatwg] RDFa statement consistency

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:29:22 +0200, Ben Adida <ben at adida.net> wrote:
> Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
>> HTML5 is too crucial as a technology to allow arbitrary experimentation.
>
> Arbitrary? Plus, consider the risk to HTML5: nothing. Browsers don't
> need to do anything (except make the attributes available in the DOM,
> which they would probably do anyways.) This is just about what validates
> and what doesn't.

FWIW, when considering language complexity, just considering whether it  
impacts user agents seems naïve. Eg, it impacts people reading the  
specification, people writing documentation, people writing books, etc.  
Adding attributes is certainly not without cost even if browsers have to  
do nothing at all. (Also, given examples such as Ubiquity, the idea is  
that it actually does impact user agents in nontrivial ways long term.)

The idea and premise of RDF is sort of attractive (people being able to do  
their own thing, unified data model, etc), though I agree with others that  
the complexity (lengthy URIs, qname/curie cruft) is an issue. Especially  
given the copy & paste authors you want to enable this for, down the road.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>