[whatwg] RDFa is to structured data, like canvas is to bitmap and SVG is to vector

[Eduard Pascual]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk at opera.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:22:40 +0100, Shelley Powers
> <shelleyp at burningbird.net> wrote:
>>
>> My apologies for not responding sooner to this thread. You see, one of the
>> WhatWG working group members thought it would be fun to add a comment to my
>> Stop Justifying RDF and RDFa web post, which caused the page to break. I am
>> using XHTML at my site, because I want to incorporate inline SVG, in
>> addition to RDFa. An unfortunate consequence of XHTML is its less than
>> forgiving nature regarding playful pranks such as this.
>>
>> I'm assuming the WhatWG member thought the act was clever. It was, indeed.
>> Three people emailed me to let me know the post was breaking while loading
>> the page in a browser, and I made sure to note that such breakage was
>> courtesy of a WhatWG member, who decided that perhaps I should just shut up,
>> here and at my site, about the Important Work people(?) here are doing.
>>
>> Of course, the person only highlighted why it is so important that
>> something such as RDFa, and SVG, and MathML, get a home in HTML5. XHTML is
>> hard to support when you're allowing comments and external input. Typically
>> my filters will catch the accidental input of crappy markup, but not the
>> intentional. Not yet. I'm not an exerpt at markup, but I know more than the
>> average person. And the average person most likely doesn't have my
>> commitment, either.
>
> http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/01/xml-sunday shows the commentor (who by the
> way seems to be on your side in this debate) simply forgot to escape
> <self-closed /> and then WordPress somehow messed up in an attempt to fix
> it. I don't think anyone tries to make you "shut up".
>
Ouch! Thanks Anne for the screenshot, otherwise I wouldn't have known
that it was my comment the one causing the issue.
My apologies Shelley for that incident. I assure you that it was not
intentional: it was a quite long post, I used some markup with the
intention of making it more readable (like italizing the quotes), and
by the end I messed things up. Thanks to the preview page I noticed
some issues, like that I had to escape the "<sarcasm>...</sarcasm>"
for it to display (I'm too used to BBCode, which leaves unrecognized
markup "as is"), but I didn't catch the <self-closed /> one (nor the
preview page did: it showed up without issues).

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Shelley Powers
<shelleyp at burningbird.net> wrote:
> You're not seeing all of the markup that caused problems, Anne. The
> intention was to crash the post.
I don't really know how much did I mess up the markup on that post;
and I only managed to fix the issues that I spotted from the preview
page, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were more issues. Once more,
I would like to clarify that this was not intentional; but, given the
tension arising again from this debate, I can understand your
reaction.