[Bug 10167] New: HTML5 Polyglot spec breaks RDFa case sensitivity

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10167

           Summary: HTML5 Polyglot spec breaks RDFa case sensitivity
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
               URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html-polyglot-20100624/#a
                    ttribute-values
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: critical
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML/XHTML Compatibility Authoring Guide (ed: Eliot
                    Graff)
        AssignedTo: eliotgra@microsoft.com
        ReportedBy: msporny@digitalbazaar.com
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html@w3.org,
                    eliotgra@microsoft.com


The polyglot spec currently states the following:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html-polyglot-20100624/#attribute-values

[[[
Polyglot markup uses lowercase letters for the values of the attributes in the
following list when they exist on HTML elements. More specifically, where
required, polyglot markup must use lower case letters for all ASCII letters in
these attribute values; however, case requirements do not apply to non-ASCII
letters such as Greek, Cyrillic, or non-ASCII Latin letters. Attributes for
HTML elements other than those in the following list may have values made of
mixed case letters. All attributes on non-HTML elements may have values made of
mixed case letters.
]]]

This means that authors won't be able to use case-sensitive vocabulary terms in
RDFa 1.1, which is a bad thing. Take the following code snippet as an example:

This document conforms to the <a vocab="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
rel="http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/conformsTo"
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/">HTML5</a> standard.

If that's not convincing, the same would apply to URLs:

This document conforms to the <a rel="http://purl.org/dc/terms/conformsTo"
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/">HTML5</a> standard.

Based on the rules above, the author would be forced to lower-case the URL,
which would create the following triple:

<> <http://purl.org/dc/terms/conformsto> <http://www.w3.org/TR/html5> .

Note that the predicate URL is lower-cased, which is a meaningless predicate -
it won't dereference to the correct machine-readable URL. This issue can be
resolved by adding text with something to this effect:

"However, attribute values that are designed to be case sensitive, like certain
RDFa predicate values or URLs placed in @rel and @rev MUST be specified in a
case sensitive manner."

You could also resolve the issue by stating that only enumerated attribute
values MUST be lowercased, all other attribute values MUST preserve case.

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Received on Wednesday, 14 July 2010 16:01:36 UTC