[whatwg] Ghosts from the past and the semantic Web

[Henri Sivonen]

On Aug 28, 2008, at 19:49, Ben Adida wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Having
>> something-other-than-data-curie="dc:http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
>
> How about
>
> <div prefix="dc:http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
>   <h2 property="dc:title">A Fun Article</h2>
>   by <h3 property="dc:creator">Ben Adida</h3>
> </div>
>
> ?
>
> This is one option we've been exploring for greater non-XML
> friendliness.

That would avoid the problem that attributes named xmlns:* are  
represented differently in the DOM in text/html and application/xhtml 
+xml.

However, it still has the problems:
  1) prefix-based indirection confuses people and, therefore, causes  
bugs (as seen with Namespaces in XML)
  2) the indirection is not robust under copying and pasting.
  3) looking up URLs wastes time when people need to write the URLs in  
markup or in software that processes markup
  4) using URIs as identifiers makes the language verbose

> (In other words, RDFa in non-X HTML.)


To avoid violating our DOM Consistency design principle, the DOM-wise  
same mechanism would need to be used in XHTML5 as well.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/