[whatwg] RDFa statement consistency

[Ben Adida]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> SQL actually doesn't affect the HTML5 language,

Isn't that nitpicking a bit? It's part of the feature-set that a browser
would have to implement, part of the books that have to be written,
etc..., right?

> I don't really think it makes sense to compare that
> feature to RDF though... (Because as far as I can tell we're not talking
> about adding an RDF triple store to browsers.)

Exactly, RDFa makes far fewer demands.

>> 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.)
> 
> No, it makes the language more complex. That's a significant cost.

So, since we've written the documentation, and we're willing to write it
in the context of HTML5, what is the *significant* cost to the HTML5 WG?

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

Just to be clear, I meant "not now" for user-agents' mandated UIs, but
certainly "now" for integrating into the language and letting user-agent
extensions handle them.

>> 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.
> 
> Yes, though again, that's a totally different feature. Supporting
> (dynamic) CSS layout probably costs us a lot more, yet having that
> doesn't imply we should simply add support for everything that is less
> complex.

I'm only trying to frame the complexity of RDFa to that of another new
feature that was recently added. I wouldn't dream of comparing to CSS,
which is obviously not new.

-Ben