[whatwg] Fuzzbot (Firefox RDFa semantics processor)

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009, Toby A Inkster wrote:
> 
> 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.

Is this true? One of the problems I thought we were trying to solve was 
that browsers were dumb, and the idea was that we wanted to enable 
browsers to take free-form questions from the user and answer them. It 
seems to me that if the browser doesn't have any special support, then 
this use case is not met.


> The question we should be discussing is not "should it work?" (because 
> it already does), but rather, "should it validate?"

No, the question is "what problem are we solving?". Talking about RDFa, 
RDF, eRDF, Microformats, and so forth doesn't answer this question.

The question "should it validate" is the question "do we want to solve the 
problem and is this the right solution", which is a question we can't 
answer without actually knowing what the problem is.

So far, all I really know is that the problem is apparently obvious.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'