[whatwg] Fuzzbot (Firefox RDFa semantics processor)

[Martin Atkins]

Toby A Inkster wrote:
> Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote:
> 
>> The concern is about every kind of metadata with respect to their
>> possible uses; but, while it's been stated that Microforamts (for
>> instance) don't require any purticular support by UAs (thus they're
>> backward compatible), RDFa would be a completely new feature, thus html5
>> specification should say what UAs are espected to do with such new
>> attributes.
> 
> RDFa doesn't require any special support beyond the special support that 
> is required for Microformats. i.e. nothing. User agents are free to 
> ignore the RDFa attributes. In that sense, RDFa already "works" in 
> pretty much every existing browser, even going back to dinosaurs like 
> Mosaic and UdiWWW.
> 
> Agents are of course free to offer more than that. Look at what they do 
> with Microformats: Firefox for instance offers an API to handle 
> Microformats embedded on a page; Internet Explorer offers its "Web 
> Slices" feature.
> 

If it is true that RDFa can work today with no ill-effect in downlevel 
user-agents, what's currently blocking its implementation? Concern for 
validation?

It seems to me that many HTML extensions are implemented first and 
specified later[1], so perhaps it would be in the interests of RDFa 
proponents to get some implementations out there and get RDFa adopted, 
at which point it will hopefully seem a much more useful proposition for 
inclusion in HTML5.

In the short term the RDFa community can presumably provide a 
specialized "HTML5 + RDFa" validator for adopters to use until RDFa is 
incorporated into the core spec and tools.

It would seem that it's much easier to get into the spec when your 
feature is proven to be useful by real-world adoption.



[1] canvas, keygen, frames and script are examples of this phenomenon.