Re: ISSUE-55: Re-enable @profile in HTML5 (draft 1)

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> * We'd like to change the default behavior of RDFa regarding XMLLiterals
>  in RDFa 1.1 - we can't do this unless there is @profile,
>  rel="profile", @version, or some other extended processing behavior
>  signaling mechanism.

Sure you can.  You just might break a few early adopters.  That's the
cost of early adoption.  Better to fix the behavior now rather than
later.  (I think it's pretty likely that you'll end up *fixing* a lot
of early adopters too, who didn't realize the full implications of the
current behavior and may have only tested on examples without extra
markup in the value.)

> * We'd like to protect authors that are currently implementing RDFa 1.0.
>  We'd like to give them the choice on when to switch their triples to
>  RDFa 1.1... if ever.

If the changes get large enough, clients will be written that only
accept the latest versions anyway.  Carrying around multiple engines
for version-switching isn't usually an option in the real world,
especially once you start picking up a real legacy weight of versions.

> * We'd like to be lenient by making @version and @profile a SHOULD and
>  not a MUST. By not specifying either, you are signalling to the user
>  agent to use the most recent version of any features found in the
>  document.

This conflicts with your previous goal - most authors are already not
using @version and/or @profile, but are expecting v1 behavior.  If you
introduce versioning now, you either have to enshrine the current
behavior, or run the risk of breaking existing markup (which you
claimed earlier that you didn't want to do).

~TJ

Received on Monday, 28 September 2009 22:19:34 UTC