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

[Shelley Powers]

Eduard Pascual wrote:
> 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).
>   
Eduard,  no worries. Your comment just demonstrated that a secondary 
preview after editing is needed to self-catch these types of errors.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. That and Anne's image, and trying to 
wade through the markup and figure out what was going on, because this 
error should have been caught, put me in an irritated mood. Especially 
since I have had people deliberately trip up my comments every time I 
write about XHTML et al (ie the Philipe Anne mentions).

But no worries, and I shouldn't have made such a jump in assumption.

Shelley