[whatwg] Micro-data/Microformats/RDFa Interoperability Requirement

[Manu Sporny]

bcc: Public RDFa Task Force mailing list (but not speaking as a member)

Thinking out loud...

It seems as though there is potential here, based on the recent IRC
conversations about the topic[1] and the use cases[2] posted by Ian,
that WHATWG's use cases/requirements, and therefore solution, could
diverge from both the Microformats community as well as the RDFa
community use cases/requirements/solution.

There should be a requirement, as Microformats and XHTML1.1+RDFa have
required, that a potential solution to this issue should be compatible
with both the Microformats and RDFa approaches. This would mean, at a
high-level:

- Not creating ambiguous cases for parser writers.
- Not triggering output in a Microformats/RDFa parser as a side-effect
  of WHATWG micro-data markup.
- Not creating an environment where WHATWG micro-data markup breaks or
  eliminates Microformats/RDFa markup.

I think these are implied since HTML5 has gone to great lengths to
provide backward compatibility. However, since I'm not clear on the
details of how this community operates, I thought it better to be
explicit about the requirement.

-- manu

[1]http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090430#l-693
[2]http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-April/019374.html

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: A Collaborative Distribution Model for Music
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/04/04/collaborative-music-model/