[whatwg] A Selector-based metadata proposal (was: Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for)

[Eduard Pascual]

I have put a new version of the CRDF document up [1]. Here is a
summary of the most significant changes:

* Location: with the migration from "Google Pages" to "Google Sites",
the PDF document will not be allowed anymore to be hosted at its
former location. I wanted to keep this proposal independent from my
own website; but in the need of a reliable location for the document,
I have made room for it on my site's host.
To avoid having to keep track of two online copies of the document nor
having an outdated version online, I have removed the document from
the old location.
My apologies for any inconvenience this might cause.

* Inline content: now full "sheets" are accepted inside the inline
crdf attribute, whatever it gets called; so something like <div
crdf='@namespace foo "http://example.com/foo#" '></div> should be
doable, mimicking RDFa's in XML-based language ability to declare
namespaces inline with code like <div
xmlns:foo="http://example.com/foo#"></div>. In addition, a
pseudo-algorythm has been defined that allows to determine whether the
content of the attribute is a full sheet or just a set of
declarations.

* Inline vs. linked metadata: this brief new section attempts to
explain when each approach is more suitable, and why both need to be
supported by CRDF.

* Conformance requirements: this new section describes what a document
must do to be "conformant", and what would tools have to do to be
"conformant". It should be taken as an informative summary rather than
as a normative definition (especially the part about tools), and is
mostly intended to give a glance of what should be expected from an
hypothetical "CRDF-aware browser".

* Microformats compatibility: after some research and lots of "trial
and error", it has been found that it is not possible to match the
microformat concept of "singular properties" with CSS3 Selectors. The
document now suggest an extension (just a pseudo-class named
":singular") to handle this. This is a very new addition and feedback
on it would be highly valuable.

[1] http://crdf.dragon-tech.org/crdf.pdf

Regards,
Eduard Pascual