[whatwg] RDFa statement consistency

[Ben Adida]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 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.

Fair enough.

Doesn't "SQL in the browser" affect all of those things by at least an
order of magnitude more? Which SQL spec, given that no SQL engine
perfectly abides by any of the SQL standards? What kind of transaction
support and locking?

> Adding attributes is certainly not without cost even if browsers have to
> do nothing at all.

The cost is small when we've already written a lot of the documentation
and specs for how this would work (in XHTML, but it's all DOM-based.)

> (Also, given examples such as Ubiquity, the idea is
> that it actually does impact user agents in nontrivial ways long term.)

Ubiquity is a plug-in. The user-agents themselves don't have to support
those features directly, at least not now.

The SQL-in-the-browser spec affects user-agents quite a bit more, since
they actually *have* to provide SQL capabilities, otherwise they're not
conformant.

> The idea and premise of RDF is sort of attractive (people being able to
> do their own thing, unified data model, etc),

I'm glad this point is coming across.

> 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.

I'm confused. Copy&Paste is meant to abstract out the complexity for
simple web publishers.

-Ben