[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics

[Eduard Pascual]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Leif Halvard Silli <lhs at malform.no> wrote:
> [...]
> But may be, after all, it ain't so bad. It is good to have the opportunity.
> :-)
This is the exactly the point (at least, IMO): RDFa may be quite good
at embedding inline metadata, but can't deal at all with describing
the semantics that are inherent to the structure. OTOH, EASE does
quite the latter, but can't handle the former at all.
That's why I was advocating for a solution that allows either
approach, and even mixing both when appropriate.

On a side note, about the idea of mixing CSS+EASE or CSS+CRDF or
CSS+whatever: my PoV is that these *should* not be mixed; but any
CSS-like semantic description would benefit from some foolproofing,
ensuring that if an author puts CRDF this would get ignored by CSS
parsers (and viceversa). In addition, CSS's error-handling rules make
this kind of shielding relatively easy. OTOH, adding the semantic code
as part of the CSS styling, or trying to consider this as part (or
even as an extension) of the CSS language is wrong by definition:
semantics is not styling; and we should try to make authors aware
enough of the difference.

Regards,
Eduard Pascual