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

On Oct 11, 2009, at 11:39 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:

>
>> So, I'm curious - Smylers, Maciej, Jonas - assuming that the RDFa
>> Community wants to change the default behavior for XMLLiteral  
>> processing
>> to match authoring usage behavior... how should we make that change  
>> in
>> RDFa 1.1 that ensures that the RDFa 1.0 documents continue to be
>> processed as RDFa 1.0, but documents not marked with a version
>> automatically use the latest processing rules (RDFa 1.1)?
>
> I would recommend against making such a change. There's *a lot* of
> things I would like to change in HTML5 that would make it backwards
> incompatible (for any definition of that term). However I think
> backwards compatibility is more important than making those changes,
> thus I have not recommended them.
>
> Now, if you decide to make this change anyway, I would recommend
> adding an attribute called something like rdfa-version. If the
> attribute is missing, the document must be processed according to RDFa
> 1.0 rules. If the attribute is present and has the value "1.1"
> (literal string comparison), then the document is processed according
> to RDFa 1.1 rules. For any other value of the attribute, I'd say that
> a consumer must not do any processing.
>
> So a document starting with
>
> <!DOCTYPE html>
> <html rdfa-version="1.1">
>
> use RDFa 1.1 processing.

That would be my general recommendation too. Anything without a  
version marker has to be assumed to be RDFa 1.0, since all RDFa  
content today is 1.0 and the vast majority does not contain any  
reliable version indicator. But there are many alternatives to rdfa- 
version, such as use of profile, or simply changing the name of the  
attribute whose processing would change under 1.1, thus allowing  
documents to have correct RDFa 1.0 and 1.1 at the same time. If there  
is a separate version indicator, it should be allowed on any element  
so that for use cases like syndication each fragment can indicate the  
version.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 12 October 2009 08:04:20 UTC