[whatwg] Trying to work out the problems solved by RDFa

[Julian Reschke]

Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote:
> ...
> This is why I was thinking about somewhat "data-rdfa-about", 
> "data-rdfa-property", "data-rdfa-content" and so on, so that, for the 
> purposes of an RDFa processor working on top of HTML5 UAs (perhaps in a 
> test phase, if needed at all, of course), an element dataset would give 
> access to "rdfa-about", instead of just "about", that is using the 
> prefix "rdfa-" as acting as a namespace prefix in xml (hence, as if 
> there were "rdfa:about" instead of "data-rdfa-about" in the markup).
> ...

That clashed with the documented purpose of data-*.

*If* we want to support RDFa, why not add the attributes the way they 
are already named???

> ...
> However, AIUI, actual xml serialization (xhtml5) allows the use of 
> namespaces and prefixed attributes, thus couldn't a proper namespace be 
> introduced for RDFa attributes, so they can be used, if needed, in 
> xhtml5 documents? I think such might be a valuable choice, because it 
> seems to me RDFa attributes can be used to address such cases where 
> metadata must stay as close as possible to correspondent data, but a 
> mistake in a piece of markup may trigger the adoption agency or foster 
> parenting algorithms, eventually causing a separation between metadata 
> and content, thus possibly breaking reliability of gathered 
> informations. From this perspective, a parser stopping on the very first 
> error might give a quicker feedback than one rearranging misnested 
> elements as far as it is reasonably possible (not affecting, and instead 
> improving, content presentation and users' "direct" experience, but 
> possibly causing side-effects with metadata).
> ...

That would make RDFa as used in XHTML 1.* and RDFa used in HTML 5 
incompatible. What for?

 > ...

BR, Julian